


The Unreal City

by causeways



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Breaking Up & Making Up, Coming Out, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Outing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 17:13:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14024886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/causeways/pseuds/causeways
Summary: He hadn’t seen Sid in two weeks. Sid had dark circles under his eyes and the beginnings of a beard; even though he looked awful, a thrill went through Zhenya’s body at seeing him.Sid said, “Have you checked your phone yet this morning?”





	The Unreal City

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sid/Geno Angst Fest Round 2, inspired by the Round 1 prompt: “Sid and Geno are fuck-buddies until one of them is outed. The other has to choose - come out or don’t come out. And figure out their feelings about each other (can they weather this storm or is this the end of their friendship too?)” Huge thanks to Merrin and Starmorgs for going above and beyond the call of betaing duty, particularly to Merrin for rewriting the summer and crying a little thinking about Sid’s mom and Geno. Any errors that made it into the final version are on me. If I missed anything, please feel free to let me know in the comments!

_June 2017_

Zhenya’s head was throbbing so badly that it actually woke him up.

He almost never drank to the point of hangovers anymore, but the past couple of weeks had proven that he hadn’t forgotten how. If anyone thought he was overdoing it, they didn’t say anything. A second Cup win in as many years meant Zhenya’s streak of drinking could be excused as enthusiasm. No one had any idea how unenthusiastic he actually was. And how could they know? He was never going to tell them.

At some point he was going to have to come up with a different solution for his misery other than drinking until his body evicted his liver, but yesterday had clearly not been that day.

The pounding in his head kept on for long enough that eventually he realized it wasn’t in his head at all but somewhere beyond his body. He gathered all his exhausted powers of deduction and determined that it was coming from the front door.

By the time Zhenya finally made it downstairs, the knocking had thankfully abated. But that was apparently as much mercy as today was going to afford him. The person at the front door was Sid.

“For the love of God,” Zhenya said. He wasn’t anywhere near ready to deal with this. He opened the door and said in English, “Sid. What are you doing here?”

He hadn’t seen Sid in two weeks. Sid had dark circles under his eyes and the beginnings of a beard; even though he looked awful, a thrill went through Zhenya’s body at seeing him.

Sid said, “Have you checked your phone yet this morning?”

The fact that Sid was there at all should have been his clue that something terrible had happened, something new and terrible beyond the already terrible thing that had been Zhenya’s past two weeks, but the real roiling dread didn’t hit him until he processed the fact that Sid had said the word ‘phone’.

“What happened,” Zhenya said flatly.

Sid stared. “I assumed you would have already looked. Shit.”

“I was sleeping before you get here,” he said.

“You should probably -- you know, I’m not sure if you should look right now, actually. Maybe it’s better if--”

Zhenya could only take so much sputtering. He left Sid at the door and went to retrieve his phone.

“Need to know whatever it is,” he said as he walked away, shooting for rational. Sid worked well with rational.

His phone was charging on his chest of drawers, where he always left it when he was sleeping. Even from across the room Zhenya could see the screen lighting up with notifications. Seven of them were missed calls from Gina, Rutherford’s assistant. He had a preemptive stomach ache.

“I really don’t know--” Sid was saying in the background, but Zhenya was reading his notifications now and he’d already stopped hearing Sid. Because he’d clicked through to the first notification he’d seen, a Twitter link to Deadspin, and the bottom had dropped out of his world.

**GENO MALKIN, GAY?**

There was a video embedded directly underneath the headline, and Zhenya clicked. Even though his body was freaking out, he needed to click. Before he finished loading he knew what it would be, a whole string of bad decisions running together in his mind, and then there it was, in surprisingly clear quality for a low-light video: the Cup, at whatever bar Flower had thought was a good idea at the time, a dozen empty shot glasses on the table with the Cup, and behind the Cup, clearly identifiable, was Zhenya, kissing a guy like his life depended on it.

The video was ten seconds long, and ended with Zhenya and the guy still kissing. Zhenya watched it three times in a row, waiting for something to change, for the video to morph into something other than itself.

“Geno.” Sid was hovering next to him, watching as Zhenya hit replay on the video over and over. “You need to call Rutherford back.”

Zhenya nodded mindlessly. He clicked Gina’s number; it rang exactly one time. “You need to come in,” she said without saying hello. 

Of course he did. “Yeah I’m--” He looked around for his keys, patting the pockets of his robe like they’d suddenly appear just because he needed them. 

Sid held up his own keys and mouthed, “I’m driving.” 

“I’m on my way,” Zhenya told Gina and hung up. 

He didn’t even need to look at anything else on his phone; he could picture all too well what the rest of the notifications would be. His phone showed a couple dozen missed calls and was ringing again as he watched it. He stabbed at the silent button.

“You should probably get dressed,” Sid said.

Zhenya was still only wearing his boxers and a robe, untied. Sid was carefully looking at his face and nowhere else.

Zhenya put on clothes and somehow autopiloted himself out of the house and into Sid’s car. There wasn’t anyone on his street. Then again, Sid’s dashboard told him it was seven in the morning. What had he been expecting, huge angry crowds? Reporters? Russian diplomats showing up to confiscate his passport again?

“There’s tea for you,” Sid said, indicating the cup holder with Starbucks in it. Zhenya couldn’t remember the last time they’d been to a Starbucks together, but the printed label on the side of the cup showed it was a black tea with an extra bag and honey written out three times on the label, exactly what Zhenya would have ordered himself and nothing Sid would have ever touched. Sid had always been good with details.

Zhenya drank his tea in the hopes that it would settle his queasy stomach and didn’t say anything, which, when he thought about it, was probably why Sid had bought him the tea in the first place. To give him something to do that wasn’t talking.

So, to be contrary, Zhenya said, “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m idiot?”

Sid kept his eyes on the road. “Is there any point? I don’t think I can tell you anything you won’t have already thought yourself.”

Zhenya actually hadn’t been thinking anything. He was doing his level best to keep from thinking anything, and he needed to keep on doing that if he was going to keep his shit together at all.

“We listen to something now, okay?” Zhenya said, and without waiting for permission he hooked up his phone to Sid’s Bluetooth and queued up the angriest Russian rap he could find. Sid had tried to learn a little Russian with Rosetta Stone, but this was years beyond Sid’s level. He could tell from the set of Sid’s shoulders that he hated the sound of the music anyway, the speed of the lyrics and the thrum of the bass, but Zhenya could lose himself in it, which was the point.

Zhenya rode the high of really terrible music all the way downtown, forgetting everything else, until the minute they parked. Then his stomach made a serious effort to escape from his body through his throat.

The front office had managed to organize a good-sized crew on short notice, Zhenya saw. Rutherford and Sullivan were pecking away at their phones near the head of the table. Barry was sitting next to two empty chairs that Zhenya assumed were for him and Sid. The only person who wasn’t there and he would have expected to see was Gennady, and he could see someone in the background fiddling with a big screen that he would bet was being set up for Gennady to video conference in. If they were surprised that Sid and Zhenya walked in together, it didn’t show on their faces.

“Geno, please, take a seat,” Mario gestured. Zhenya sat, and Sid took the seat next to him. Sid was there in his capacity as the team captain, Zhenya realized abruptly. Of course. He wasn’t sure what would have been happening otherwise. Then again, it was seven-thirty in the morning and he was reasonably sure he was still drunk.

The tech guy had finished setting up the screen and Gennady’s face appeared. He didn’t look happy. On the table by the wall Zhenya registered that someone had actually organized for snacks in the meeting room.

“The first thing that we want you to know if that whatever happens, you have the full support of the Penguins organization,” Mario said.

Through all the morning so far, Zhenya had been able to keep it together, but that one sentence nearly broke him.

“Thank you,” he said, all he could manage smoothly. He blinked back the wetness in his eyes.

“I’ll make sure the guys don’t cause any trouble,” Sullivan said. “I don’t think anyone will, but if they even so much as think about it we’ll crack some skulls.”

“Now,” Mario said gently. “Jen has some things to ask you.”

“First,” Jen said, “we need to know: who is the guy in the video?”

They were all poised, and Zhenya wished he had good PR news for them. He didn’t. “I have no idea,” he said.

He remembered the guy vaguely. Watching the video had jogged his memory. He remembered the guy hitting on him, though that was just a thing that happened sometimes. People always hit on him, even when he had girlfriends. He always let them down easy, bantered with them and signed something, took a picture with them if they wanted. He’d made out with girls sometimes, when he was single, but never with a guy. But last night… He’d had too much to drink, fine, he did that often enough right now. He’d just been so sick of everything, and in the mood to make a really dumb decision. And he had. 

Zhenya continued, “I mean, I meet him at the bar. I don’t know him.”

The whole room exhaled collectively, though Zhenya couldn’t tell whether it was with relief or disappointment. 

“Well, that answers the question of whether or not you’re in a relationship with him,” Jen said, tapping at her laptop. “Okay, so here’s the deal. We can try to spin it as something other than what it is, but I don’t think anyone is going to buy it. I don’t think anyone is going to believe that it’s some kind of a mistake.”

Of course it was a mistake, but that wasn’t what Jen meant.

“It’s clear that it’s you, in the video,” Jen continued. “People have photos of you leaving the bar wearing the same clothes you’re wearing in the video and I hate to tell you, Geno, but you weren’t wearing something we could pass off as something anybody would be wearing.”

That was...probably accurate. Sid was constantly chirping him about how his clothes stood out in America. Zhenya always liked to remind him that that what Sid wore made it look like Sid was part of the wall.

“You don’t necessarily have to make a statement. You can tell us how you want to spin it, but it would be helpful for us to know the truth in case anything else comes up. As for how you want to spin it, here are your choices. We could deny it, though that’ll look like we’re being willfully ignorant and possibly homophobic. We could try to say it was just you messing around with a guy. You know that Geno, affectionate dude -- like that. I can’t really council either of those things, in good conscience. I think the best choice is to acknowledge that everyone knows that it’s you and that it is what it looks like. Then we just have to decide how to play it.”

Zhenya didn’t love any of the options, but he thought Jen was probably right. There wasn’t much likelihood of anyone buying that the video was anything other than what it was.

“It might make sense for you to spend some time talking to Barry and Gennady before you make a decision,” Jen said. “We’re aware of how this is going to play in Russia and we’re going to do our best to help mitigate some of what is going to happen.” 

“When you need to know what we’re going to do?” Zhenya asked.

Jen caught Mario’s eye.

“This afternoon would be good,” Mario said.

*

Someone had found Zhenya a smaller conference room with frosted glass windows so he could Skype privately with Gennady, who was already back in Russia for the summer. 

“What the actual fuck were you thinking?” Gennady hissed on the laptop screen.

“How would I know I was being filmed,” Zhenya said crossly.

“I don’t understand how you let it be possible that you’ve been my client, my friend for all these years and never once considered mentioning that you’re interested in men.”

“It was never supposed to be relevant,” Zhenya said. 

“Zhenya, you’re being an idiot. I’m your agent. More than your agent. I don’t understand how you could possibly think that a major career-affecting secret could be anything other than my business.”

Zhenya drummed his fingers against his leg under the table. “Would you take me as your client if you knew?”

“Surely you don’t think you’re the only athlete from our country who might ever worry about finding himself in this situation,” Gennady replied, which didn’t answer Zhenya’s question. “The difference between you and those other athletes is that they don’t keep things like this from their agent. Things that could change their careers.”

Zhenya’s first, contrary instinct was to ask if this was really career-changing, but he knew it was. “What difference would it have made, if you’d known?”

“I could have told you to keep it in your pants when you’re in a bar, for one.”

Which didn’t help Zhenya in the least. He could have told himself that. He’d been telling himself that ever since he was twelve and first realized what it meant that he looked at boys the way he did. “I really did think I could keep it a secret,” he said. “I thought I could make it not matter.”

“I wish for your sake that it didn’t,” Gennady said. “You’re aware of what this means.”

It had been skirting around the edges of Zhenya’s consciousness. He’d tried to avoid thinking about it, but it seemed that he’d run out of ways to do that. He sucked in a breath. “No more Russian hockey.”

Gennady looked at him for a long moment, but Zhenya didn’t say anything else. Zhenya had watched Gennady’s face break news to him for years, but he hadn’t seen this look before and it scared him. Finally he said, “It’s bigger than that, Evgeni. If this goes the way I’m afraid it will, this means you can’t come home at all.”

Gennady waited for that to sink in.

“Let’s put it a different way,” Gennady said. “My contacts tell me that the government hasn’t decided to what extent to prosecute you yet. There are some voices for leniency. If you deny everything and never do anything of this nature ever again, they might take some kind of lighter stance. If you come back to Russia now, marry a nice Russian girl, have children, play in the KHL…”

Zhenya recoiled. He could have expected all of it, but the KHL still caught him off guard. “You know I’m not going to play for Magnitogorsk. I’m a Penguin. The Penguins are my team.”

Gennady nodded. “And even if you did agree, no one can guarantee that it would be enough. There are sufficient voices for punishing you to the full extent of the law. No matter what you agree to, it might not make a difference.

“But you have to know that if you do anything other than what they’re asking, they’ll have no choice. You’ll be perceived as flaunting your perverted American lifestyle, no matter if you’re never involved with another man again.”

Zhenya’s head ached. His whole self ached. “So there’s nothing we can do to fix it.”

“Not unless you can come up with a way to travel back in time and not go to that bar.”

Zhenya exhaled long and loud. “If I solve the mystery of time travel, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

*

The front office let him leave, Jen promising that she’d check in with him around lunchtime. Since he’d gotten there in Sid’s car, Zhenya steeled himself for having to ride back to his house with Sid; he couldn’t think of a good way to weasel out of it. But someone in the universe was looking out for him on this godforsaken mess of a morning, because once Jen realized they’d come together, she ordered a car for Zhenya. “We need Sid to stay for a bit.” 

So Zhenya got to blissfully zone out in a car driven by someone who was paid to be professionally disinterested instead of being cornered with Sid. Who had been playing his best professionally disinterested possum this morning, now that Zhenya thought about it. Nonetheless he was grateful for the lack of emotional variables in his ride back to his house.

The minute he got there he called his parents. 

His mother didn’t immediately pick up, and for many long seconds of Skype trilling, he pictured everything that could have happened to them, all sorts of nameless things to fear.

But finally his mother did pick up and he could breathe again.

“Oh, thank all the saints, it’s you,” his mother said. “Papa, come here, it’s Zhenya.”

“You can’t believe the phone calls we’ve been getting,” his father said.

“We aren’t answering the phone anymore," his mother continued, seemingly calm. And then a ragged sob burst out of her mouth as though she had no control over it at all.

“Mama,” Zhenya said, helpless in the face of her tears.

“Oh, Zhenya. Oh, my boy. You know we love you,” she said. His father laid an arm around her. No one was asking Zhenya if it was true, what they were saying about them, because -- it dawned on him now -- they didn’t have to. The fact that he wasn’t denying it was enough.

“What your mother said is true for both of us,” his father said. “Please never doubt that we love you.”

Zhenya was crying then, too, but it couldn’t be helped. Anyway, if anyone could see him cry, it was his parents.

“What’s been going on with Denis?” Zhenya asked, to keep his parents talking, to give them all a chance to recover. It had been a while since he’d spoken with anyone in his family, busy as he’d been in the playoffs run, and it was good to hear his parents talk about their family, their friends, normal things. It was good to pretend for a little while that things were normal.

After they hung up, Zhenya felt like all of the energy had been wrenched out of him. He sat down in a lounge chair to watch some home renovation TV; it always calmed him down. He woke up a good while later, disoriented but with his memory sadly intact. Only then did he finally think about his notifications.

Eventually he was going to have to look at them. He considered making himself a drink to make it go easier and decided that maybe a drink was not the thing he needed right now. He didn’t need to open up a Pandora’s box of downwardly spiraling decisions. Ever since the night they’d won the Cup Zhenya had been starting out with one drink that became three that became exponentially many, and now sounded like a good time to be done with that. He picked up his phone.

Most of the text messages weren’t as bad as he’d thought. He had messages from pretty much everyone on the team, and every single one of them was supportive. There were a lot of messages from players from other teams, too, including most of the NHL Russians, who would have to distance themselves from him publicly, he knew. Privately their messages ranged from “fuck that guy that filmed you” to “fuck Russia.”

He had a bunch of missed calls, in addition to all the texts. Three of the missed calls were from Sid, all time-stamped from the middle of the night.

Before last night, Sid hadn’t called him in the past two weeks, not once.

The last of the phone calls had been time-stamped just before the only text message Sid had sent: _on the way over, don’t go anywhere_.

Was there any point in thinking about why Sid had felt like he needed to take care of this personally? Probably not. It probably didn’t have anything to do with Zhenya himself. Sid was the captain. There was probably a section in the captain’s manual that dealt with precisely this situation.

Or then again, maybe not, Zhenya thought hysterically. He was the first out gay star in the whole damned NHL, after all.

He spent a while wandering around the house, feeling like an alien. How had it even come to pass that he owned a house in Pittsburgh? He couldn’t remember the process of acquiring all the things that filled it, all the things that made it look like this was his life. It must have been gradual, he knew. He could remember when he had gotten individual things. It was the aggregate that he was missing.

Abruptly he had to get out of the house. The place was claustrophobic and he couldn’t stay inside, where all these individual items didn't make sense to him anymore. He was still hungover, but he didn’t even care. He went for a run.

He would have loved to wear sunglasses, a hoodie, ten layers of anonymity, but it was late June and boiling hot outside and he would be more noticeable if he wore anything other than a t-shirt and shorts. But actually the godawful heat was going to end up working in his favor: no one in their right mind would be outside right now. Well, he wasn’t in his right mind right now, either. He took himself on a slow, punishing loop through Sewickley Heights, huffing in the thick humidity of Pittsburgh summer, and came back sweat-soaked and red-faced and a little less hungover than he’d been before.

When he got back to the house, he had a pile of new missed calls. The only ones he paid any attention to were the ones from the Pens front office. He had a voicemail from Jen asking him to call as soon as possible to let her know how to proceed.

She picked up on the first ring. “So, what’s the decision?”

Zhenya made himself breathe slowly, in and out. “It’s okay to make the press release,” he said. “It’s okay when you confirm it’s me in the video. But I don’t think--maybe we don’t talk about my sexuality.” It was a technicality, he knew perfectly well. He was in a video kissing a man; not mentioning his sexuality wouldn’t make that matter any less. It wasn’t going to change anything about Russia’s decisions.

“Okay, Geno,” Jen said. “We’ll write up the press release. We’ll let you know when it’s out there.”

*

The Penguins’ official press release was as supportive as could be while also managing to provide no real details about Zhenya’s life. That was a nice contrast to the Russian media. Zhenya was been doing his best not to read anything in Russian, but people kept tagging him in things, and anything written in Russian jumped directly into his brain without his consent. Nothing about him that was coming from Russia was positive. Eventually he turned his Twitter notifications off.

His agents and Penguins PR had agreed that the best move was for Zhenya to go ahead and keep posting to his social media accounts like always, like nothing had changed. “We’re not going to have you personally issue a statement about the video,” Jen said on the phone, “because we don’t want you to get in even more trouble in Russia.”

Zhenya just laughed. “I don’t think it make a difference now. They already know everything.” Technically they didn’t know everything, actually, but they already knew enough to condemn him.

“Nonetheless, unless we have something positive to add to the conversation, I think our best move is silence,” Jen said. She paused, then added, “Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you. Good luck, Geno.”

Later, when he stopped and thought about it, Zhenya realized that the one thing he hadn’t worried about was how the Penguins PR team would react. On some level he’d clearly always known that they meant it when they said they supported their players. They really did have his back.

*

_June 2016_

The summer Anna left him, Zhenya went home to Russia like usual. He trained like usual. He visited his family and endured their disappointment.

“We thought for sure she’d stay,” they said. “She was going to marry you.”

Zhenya did a lot of drinking and let friends set him up with friends of theirs on dates that never went anywhere. He made out with women in clubs and took them home sometimes, but only when he made sure that everyone involved was drunk enough that if he couldn’t get it up for a woman no one would be suspicious.

And a few times, when he was horny enough that he couldn’t stand it and drunk enough to talk himself into it, he went to a club in Moscow that he usually pretended not to know about and found a guy to suck off.

He always told himself he wouldn’t do it again. 

*

_June 2017_

When the doorbell rang around dinnertime, it didn’t really surprise Zhenya. He figured it was Sid showing up in his captainly context again, there to make sure he hadn’t done anything stupid after the Pens press release had gone live. And he wasn’t wrong: Sid was at the door. But so were Flower, Duper, Kessel, Horny, Tanger, and Sheary.

“Normally we’d have asked if you wanted to go out,” Flower said. “But under the circumstances we figured staying in might be better.”

“We come bearing video games and Chinese takeout,” Sheary announced, sounding genuinely enthusiastic.

Zhenya stage directed the acquisition of plates as well as utensils for those who didn’t feel capable of chopsticks, then let himself be drawn into a game of NHL 17. Going along with it seemed easier than resisting, and he was surprised an hour later to find that the team’s sneaky tactics had in fact worked. He hadn’t been thinking about anything other than kicking Kessel’s ass for the past hour. He swapped out with Tanger to get some dinner after that.

On a hunch Zhenya checked the refrigerator. Sure enough, Sid had set aside a plate for him, so the vultures hadn’t eaten all of the egg rolls before he got there. He microwaved the plate and set to eating.

Sid found him in the kitchen while Zhenya was still working his way through his shrimp noodles.

“Your idea?” Zhenya gestured at the house at large with his chopsticks.

Sid shook his head. “Flower and Horny’s. I just told them what to get for takeout.”

Zhenya nodded. He’d recognized Sid’s hand in the food, at least. He continued on with his noodles. He wasn’t particularly graceful eating noodles with chopsticks, but as far as he figured no one else much was, either.

“They’re really good guys, Geno,” Sid said.

Zhenya knew what he meant by that, and he was also already aware of it. He’d read their text messages. But Sid maybe had a point. It wasn’t hard to send a supportive text message when you weren’t going to have to see the other person for the rest of the summer, anyway. Their presence in his house meant something.

“You want to play me after you finish eating?” Sid asked.

Zhenya stared. Sid was trying so hard to make things seem normal for the moment. But if he was trying, Zhenya could try, too. “What, you volunteering to lose? Bad idea, Sid. You terrible at video games.”

It was a pretty weak chirp, as far as things went, but Sid valiantly picked up what Zhenya was putting down. “We’ll see whose ass gets kicked in a minute here.”

Sid lost miserably, of course, which Zhenya was sure had been the whole point. All the guys chirped the shit out of Sid, and Zhenya could hang back and bask in the glory of being amazing at computer hockey.

Eventually the guys started to taper off, one by one. Finally it was down to just Zhenya in the kitchen, cleaning up rice containers and chopstick paper sleeves.

Sid materialized in the doorway from the hall. Zhenya hadn’t really thought he’d left yet, and for a moment it still felt like it could be normal for Sid to be here, staying after everyone left. “Hey. I think I’m going to head out.”

“Okay, Sid.”

“You need any help with any of that?” He waved at the kitchen.

“It’s okay, Sid. I got it.”

“Okay, Geno.” Sid sounded like he wanted to insist on helping but he didn’t do it. Two weeks ago he would have insisted, jostling with Zhenya for space in the kitchen. How many times had they been in this kitchen together with takeout from that exact Chinese place? A dozen times, easily. 

Zhenya’s whole self ached for how easy things had felt two weeks ago.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Sid said eventually, and left Zhenya in the kitchen, alone with the takeout garbage.

*

Zhenya had always liked Pittsburgh. He’d come here to play the best hockey in the world and he had. He and Sid were the best, no one could argue that after three Cup wins, after the back-to-back wins they’d had. Pittsburgh was where that had happened -- he couldn’t have had this if he hadn’t left Russia. It was worth it, to be sure. But the plan had never been to _stay_.

The plan was: he was going to go to Pittsburgh and play the best hockey he could for as long as he could, and at the end of that time, whenever it was, he’d have Russia to go back to.

He’d known that living in the US for this long would change him; how could it not? But at his core he was still himself, still essentially Russian, and he kept going back to Russia in the summer so that when he went back to stay he’d still feel like he knew what it was like to be there. He’d never missed a summer in Russia, not once. He loved the feeling of sinking back into his language, being able to read all of the signs without thinking. He’d never forget the first time he’d come back, after his first season in the NHL, and how he’d been startled to be able to understand all the little kids around him. He’d spent a year in America, where even just trying to have regular conversations in English with his teammates made his head hurt. Coming back to Moscow, it had been overwhelming to be on the subway, with all the conversations happening at once all around him, and he could understand every word. He’d thought it would feel good to be home, and it did, but it was overwhelming in its own way, suddenly being able to function fully as an adult, no help needed. Now, even after a decade, he still couldn’t understand what little kids in Pittsburgh were saying when they babbled in English. When he was in a crowd, he could let English wash over him like a white noise machine. Being back in Russia and knowing what everyone was saying without effort felt like a superpower.

He’d made a home for himself in Pittsburgh by now, of course. He owned a house here. He had his favorite restaurants where they’d known him for years. He had his friends. He had Sid. He used to have Sid.

Pittsburgh had never been the forever plan, but it had been a good plan. As long as he knew there was another plan waiting for him afterwards, it was a good plan. He thrived on the drama of the rink, all the lights and the noise and whatever song they picked for home goals that season, always one he always thought he couldn’t stand for a few games’ worth of goals until it inevitably grew on him. He’d thought he’d never give any of it up until the last possible moment, until his body couldn’t play the game anymore. Hockey was everything. But he’d always known that it wouldn’t be everything forever. Once hockey couldn’t be everything anymore, then he’d get Russia back.

That was what he’d always thought.

*

_September 2016_

At the end of the summer, when he came back from Russia, he hadn’t dared do anything with men anymore. He was too recognizable in Pittsburgh, the accent a giveaway if his face wasn’t clear enough already. Before the end of last summer he’d never even considered doing anything with men in Pittsburgh. When he’d been with Anna or Oksana, he had never let the thought cross his mind. He really had wanted his relationships to work, no matter what either Anna or Oksana had said as they were in the process of leaving him. He hadn’t been trying to give them reasons to leave him; they’d found plenty of those all by themselves.

When the team found out Zhenya’s relationship had crumbled, they’d stepped up to try to make it better, the same way his friends in Russia had: take him out, get him drunk, find him women. He tried to go along with it. He’d thought he made a good showing. But really he was sick of the whole thing. He couldn’t make himself take these women home. Usually he could imagine his way into sleeping with women, pretending they weren’t soft and curved, but right now he couldn’t help thinking that no matter how hard he tried he would never really want a woman, never be able to get married and stay married, never have kids--

And that was when Sid had showed up at his door with two bags of the best Russian food Pittsburgh could offer and a bottle of medium-grade Russian vodka.

*

_September 2016_

Zhenya was a little stumped to see Sid at the door. It was September, but the season hadn’t started yet, and anyway Sid didn’t usually show up unannounced. But Zhenya was even more stumped by the unmistakable smell of what he was carrying.

“Sid,” Zhenya said. “Where you get Russian food?”

“I called Gonch and Ksenia,” Sid said. “Are you gonna let me in?”

Sid had been in Zhenya’s house a couple of times before. He knew where to find the kitchen but not where Zhenya kept his plates and silverware, so Zhenya took over getting things out and waited for Sid to tell him why he was there. If he stayed silent long enough and let Sid squirm, eventually Sid would break.

Zhenya opened the bags and unpacked the containers: Olivier salad, schi, pelmeni, kotlety, meat pies, plov. Ksenia had gone all out. Sid managed to stay silent all the way through Zhenya plating the food before he finally said, “Gonch just told me that Ksenia was going to make some things. What are we eating?”

Zhenya laughed. “It’s good, Sid. You going to like it.”

Sid helped carry the plates over to the table and let Zhenya pour him a glass of vodka. He made a funny face eating the schi but overall seemed to be enjoying himself. “Is this really what the food in Russia is like?”

“Sort of.” Ksenia had complained for years about how hard it was to source Russian ingredients in Pittsburgh, but things had been getting better recently, thanks to the power of the internet. 

“Not the same as your mom’s food?”

Zhenya scowled. “Nobody’s food the same as my mom’s food.” A moment later he relented. “Ksenia is second best, though.”

Sid smiled at that. “Do you want more vodka?”

Zhenya looked at his glass and saw he’d drunk a good bit more already than he would have guessed. He still wasn’t really sure what Sid was doing here. “Okay, it’s fine.”

They ate as much of the food as they could and set about making a sizable dent in the bottle of vodka.

“I have no idea if this vodka is any good,” Sid admitted eventually. “I mean, it tastes fine to me, the guy said it was pretty good?”

“It’s fine, Sid.” It wasn’t anything like top-shelf, but Zhenya wasn’t about to complain when Sid had gone to the trouble of trying to procure vodka that wasn’t in the regular American grocery store.

Finally Sid said, “So I wanted to talk to you. See how you’re doing after everything. With Anna, I mean.”

And there it was, Zhenya thought: the reason for the evening.

“It’s fine, Sid.”

“That’s what you just said about the vodka.”

Zhenya took a big sip of the vodka and smacked his lips obnoxiously. “What, you want synonyms? It’s good, Sid, delicious! You know my English, it’s not so creative.”

“Seriously, though,” Sid said. “The guys are worried about you. What happened with her? We thought everything was going well.”

It _had_ been going well, as far as Zhenya knew, right up until the moment she told him she was leaving him. “Yeah.”

“But she still left,” Sid said.

Zhenya exhaled noisily and rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah, Sid. She left. What you want to hear? Nobody cheated. Nobody did anything wrong. You don’t need to fix.”

He took a good solid gulp of vodka to distract himself from the way Sid was looking at him.

The smart thing to do would have been to tell Sid he was tired, and thanks for the food and the liquor, and he needed to get some sleep. He could order a cab for Sid and Sid could come back in the morning to get his car.

But Zhenya didn’t do the smart thing. Instead he said, “Your vodka is okay, but I have better,” which made Sid laugh a little. 

He went to the liquor cabinet. Sid was feeling sorry for him, and he was feeling sorry for himself, so he broke out the really good stuff, the stuff he usually saved for when other Russians were visiting. He poured them each a generous glass.

“You taste the difference?” Zhenya asked.

Sid made a considering face then obviously decided not to lie. “Not really.”

It didn’t matter. Sid could drink Zhenya’s good vodka anyway. Zhenya could always bring back more, the next time he went home to Russia. “You need vodka practice, Sid.”

“Vodka practice?” Sid said, amused.

Zhenya grinned. “Drink more vodka.”

“I’ll get right on that.”

They worked their way through Zhenya’s second-best bottle of vodka. By the time they’d finished drinking it, Sid decided that they needed to go back to the bottle he’d brought, for comparison’s sake. He claimed he'd be able to tell the difference now.

“You’re big liar,” Zhenya said, and opened his third-best bottle of vodka instead.

“I still don’t get it, Geno,” Sid said some time later. “I don’t understand why in the world she would leave you. Why anyone would leave you.”

Sid was clearly drunk now. He had a flush high on his cheeks and he was starting to sound too earnest.

“You’re just, you’re _you_ , you know?” Sid said. “You’re the best.”

“You’re best too, Sid,” Zhenya said, amused.

“You’re the best teammate,” Sid continued. “You’re like. You’re one of the best people I know."

"Okay, Sid." Somehow in the meantime the third-best bottle of vodka was gone. He considered going for his fourth-best bottle, but the vodka Sid had brought was still on the table, half-empty. It somehow tasted better at this point in the night.

He'd been letting Sid meander through conversations for a while, but Sid kept returning faithfully to the purpose of his evening.

"It’s not really any of my business, or the team’s business," Sid was saying. "You don’t have to tell me what happened with Anna. I just want you to know that I’m here for you and I support you. You're the best teammate--”

"You already say," Zhenya told him.

"--and you're the best person. You're the best -- Geno. You're the best Geno."

"Only Geno." Zhenya grinned, in spite of himself. "Sid, how you get so drunk? You bad at vodka practice."

"I can't think of a reason for anyone to leave you," Sid said.

"It's not her fault," Zhenya said.

"You said it wasn't anybody's fault."

Zhenya had said more than he really meant to. Maybe Sid wasn’t the only one who was drunk.

"Sorry, Geno," Sid said, scrubbing at his face with his hands. "I really don't--" he started saying, at the same time that Zhenya began:

“She left because I’m--”

Zhenya cut himself off. He wasn't sure what he was thinking.

Quietly Sid said, “Geno?”

When Zhenya was a kid, he’d hoped that if he didn’t say the word out loud, ever, in any context, the truth would go away, like he could remove its power over him through his silence. As an adult, he’d told himself that it was prudence that kept him from saying it. You never knew who might hear and get the wrong idea, or rather, in his case, the right one. But right now, he was alone with Sid, in his house. There wasn’t anyone who could overhear, and Zhenya was drunk. And if there was anyone in the world he could trust, it was Sidney Crosby.

“She left because I’m gay,” he said.

The world didn’t end. A gaping pit into hell didn’t immediately swallow him up. He didn't drop dead immediately; he didn't stop breathing.

Sid said, “Oh,” and then didn’t say anything else for what felt like an eternity. He was staring at Zhenya like he was trying to put him together again with this new information. Zhenya tried not to squirm under the intensity of Sid's attention.

And then, of all things, Sid started laughing.

“What’s funny?” Zhenya said. 

“You--really? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“It’s not joke.” He’d made the wrong decision, telling Sid.

“No, no, you don’t get it. Me too, Geno.”

Sid was damned right that Zhenya didn’t get it. The input didn’t make any sense, the way his whole first three months in Pittsburgh had felt, only he did understand the words; he just couldn’t reconcile them into actual meaning. He was frustrated and kind of mad, but still he made himself ask for clarification.

“You too what?”

“I’m gay, too.”

Zhenya stared. “What?”

“I’m gay, too,” Sid repeated, so there wasn’t any room for misinterpretation.

And then Zhenya started laughing, too, the utter absurdity of what was happening here finally sinking in. Of all the things that ever could have happened, this would have been the last thing he guessed.

Sid said, “I mean, you--really, Geno? All this time and you never said anything--”

“ _You_ never said anything!” Zhenya protested.

“Okay, fine, fair,” Sid said. “But really? All this time?”

“Always,” Zhenya said. His own response made him stop laughing.

“For me too.” Sid looked serious all of a sudden. He still had the high flush of drunkenness to his cheeks. “Fuck, Geno. I wish we’d known before. I always figured I couldn’t be the only one.”

Zhenya replayed ten years of knowing Sid in his head. All that time, he’d never really known Sid to date anyone. Everyone including Zhenya had always assumed Sid was just a really private person. But now Zhenya knew otherwise, or at least knew more. And he knew that no matter what Sid’s last ten years had been like, they must have been some kind of lonely.

Before he could think about what he was doing, Zhenya reached out and touched Sid’s shoulder.

“You’re not the only one,” he said.

He meant for the gesture to be one of solidarity, and it could have landed that way if he’d squeezed his Sid’s shoulder and moved his hand away.

But he didn’t move his hand.

Sid started violently, sucked in a breath, and said, “Geno?”

All too late he realized the danger. He’d managed to go ten years without letting himself spend time wondering if he found Sid attractive, for one because what was there to wonder? He wasn’t blind. But mostly because Sid had never been gay.

Until this moment in Zhenya’s own living room, where Sid had just told Zhenya directly to his face that all this time Zhenya had been wrong.

And Zhenya could resist a lot of things, but some things were beyond the power of mortal men, and this was one of them: Sidney Crosby looking at him levelly with interest and intent.

“Geno,” Sid said, a decision made. He stood up, surged forward into Zhenya's space, and kissed him.

Zhenya didn't think. He kissed back.

Sid kissed the way he played hockey. He was all in, kissing like he never wanted to breathe again, his total intensity focused on Zhenya. He got his hands on Zhenya’s jaw, in his hair, and even though Sid’s terrible playoff beard was thankfully gone his stubble rasped against Zhenya’s mouth in a way that jolted electric straight down to his dick.

Zhenya wanted to pull Sid down on top of him, get their hips lined up, get Sid grinding down on him. He needed pressure on his cock. He tugged at Sid, but Sid pulled back and gave Zhenya a look like he knew just what Zhenya was thinking and was having none of it.

“Bedroom,” Sid said. 

They made it to Zhenya’s bedroom, barely. Zhenya pulled his sweatpants down and Sid kicked his jeans off hastily and they were a tangle of legs on top of the covers. Zhenya ended up on top, finally, finally grinding down on Sid’s dick, all the pressure he’d wanted. It felt incredible.

Sid was saying, “Oh fuck, Geno, fuck,” as he thrust wildly, his mouth every one of the fantasies Zhenya had never let himself have.

Zhenya wanted everything, wanted to see Sid’s lips wrapped around his cock, wanted to get his hands on both their cocks and jerk them off together, slicked with lube -- but they weren’t going to get anywhere close to lasting long enough to need lube right now, rutting together as Sid said, “Shit, Geno, I’m gonna--”

“Yeah, Sid, yeah,” Zhenya said as Sid shuddered.

The slick of Sid’s come was what did it for Zhenya. He thrust wildly against Sid and cried out, coming.

He collapsed down afterwards, boneless and half on top of Sid. Sid shoved at him a little. “What were you saying a minute ago?”

Zhenya thought back and realized he'd been speaking in Russian, some string of gibberish as he came. “I say you have nice cock, so good for me,” he lied, and was delighted at the way Sid blushed.

“We should get cleaned up,” Sid said.

The idea was valid, but in practice the bathroom wasn’t within arm’s reach, and all of the vodka they’d drunk was abruptly hitting Zhenya.

“We’ll do later,” Zhenya said.

Sid was still talking, but Zhenya was wrung out and drunk and he had no idea what Sid was saying, the English turning to soothing white noise as he closed his eyes.

In the middle of the night Zhenya woke up to Sid nudging him awake to hand him a wet washcloth. Zhenya wiped himself off while Sid watched, unselfconscious. Zhenya’s dick took notice before he’d even finished with the washcloth, and Zhenya grabbed for Sid and maneuvered him so Zhenya could wrap a hand around both of their dicks like he’d wanted to before. He got them both off sloppy and slow while Sid tried to kiss him and mostly just succeeded in panting into Zhenya’s mouth.

When Zhenya woke up in the morning, Sid was still there, asleep in Zhenya’s bed, so close to Zhenya that they were sharing the same pillow. Sid returned to consciousness in front of him, blinking, before Zhenya was awake enough to decide how to feel.

“Hey,” Sid said, and smiled, and touched a hand to Zhenya’s cheek. “Good morning.”

And Zhenya couldn't help himself mirroring Sid's smile, letting himself have a moment where it felt like he could have everything he wanted.

*

_June 2017_

Zhenya hadn’t wanted to think about the video, but it was hard not to. It was everywhere, after all. And he kept coming back to Gennady’s comment: _What the actual fuck were you thinking?_

It wasn’t that he hadn’t been thinking. He hadn’t forgotten where he was, how unprivate it was. No amount of drinking would have been enough to make him forget what he’d burned into his brain as a kid, terrified about what it meant that he never saw the point of what his friends were doing with girls but was mesmerized by his teammates’ asses. Ever since then he’d known: no one could ever know.

But no one couldn’t truly mean no one. He wasn’t a monk; he wasn’t going to sentence himself to a sexless life. Relationships, though, were out of the question.

Until Sid. For the better part of a year there had been Sid and then there hadn’t, and the two weeks after winning the Cup again, the two weeks that should have been jubilant, had been anything but. Drinking to get drunk and no point to even that, and for just a few seconds, in a dark corner of a crowded underground bar, Zhenya had let a man catch his eye, graze against his arm, and then--

He’d wanted, just for a moment, to feel something different than what he was feeling. He’d wanted to know that he could do something different.

He should have known better.

*

There was a huge flurry of internet activity that Zhenya mostly had nothing to do with. A bunch of his teammates were tweeting and posting about their full support for Zhenya and his phone started to blow up again, which made him think that now would be a good time to lose his phone and replace it with a new one with an unknown number. And delete his twitter. But who was he kidding? That wouldn’t make any of this go away. 

He did delete his twitter account though. 

And in the evening two days after the video broke, there was a knock on the door. Despite himself, he found himself traitorously hoping it was Sid.

When he opened the door and there Sid was, he said, “Now not a good time, Sid.” He wasn’t sure when he was going to stop feeling Sid’s presence like a punch in the stomach, and everything else was enough of a gut punch already.

“I know,” Sid said. “I’m not trying to make things worse. Will you let me in?” He opened the bag he was holding so that Zhenya could see the familiar Tupperware: Sid had enlisted Ksenia. 

“Gonch and Ksenia send their best and said you should let them know if you need anything,” Sid said. “Gonch also said he called you to tell you to come to dinner this week.” 

Seryozha had indeed left that message. Zhenya had been putting off replying to it, probably because he was chickenshit. “I’ll call him back later,” Zhenya said, finally stepping aside and accepting his fate. 

Sid went straight for the kitchen and found plates and bowls. Many times when they’d eaten together at Zhenya’s house they’d gotten takeout, but probably nearly as often they’d cooked, Sid easily finding pots and pans and hip-checking Zhenya as they jockeyed for position near the oven. Seeing Sid acting comfortable in his kitchen felt so normal, though of course it wasn’t, and anyway Zhenya could tell that he wasn’t actually relaxed.

Zhenya sighed. “What do you want, Sid?”

“Let’s just eat,” Sid said.

They ate. The food was fantastic, of course. Ksenia was a phenomenal cook, even making do with American ingredients. Nothing like Zhenya’s mother, though, and the wave of homesickness that hit him then was stronger than anything he’d experienced in years, not since he’d first been in Pittsburgh and miserable, knowing he was where he was supposed to be but unable to cope yet, lost in a foreign country with a language that wasn’t his.

He kept eating. What could he do? Maybe this was the only kind of Russian food he was ever going to eat again, good but indefineably not quite right, not the food from home, not his mother’s cooking.

“Hey Geno,” Sid said. “Deep breaths.”

He hadn’t realized until Sid said it that he had been physically freaking out. He focused on his yoga breathing: in and finally out.

“I didn’t ever want anything like this to happen to you,” Sid said in a low voice, once Zhenya had finally calmed down. “I never wanted this to be the way things went. I know that doesn’t make this better for you. I just wanted you to know that.”

“It’s not your fault,” Zhenya said. It would be nice if Sid had actually done anything wrong. Then Zhenya would have someone to direct his careening pile of emotions towards. But Sid hadn’t done anything wrong at all, and Zhenya had no one to blame but himself.

“The fact that it’s not my fault doesn’t mean I can’t be sorry it happened,” Sid said.

Zhenya nodded his understanding and turned back to his food.

When they were finished eating, Sid didn’t linger. He helped with an efficient clean-up and then let himself out.

“See you soon, Geno,” he said. 

As soon as the door closed behind him, Zhenya let himself slump against the front door. But only for a moment, because now he really was going to have to call Seryozha, at the very least to thank Ksenia for dinner.

“I got your message,” he said when Seryozha picked up. 

“The voicemail or the food?” Seryozha sounded a little bit amused. 

“Both. Tell Ksenia thanks for the borscht.” 

“We both want you to know that you’re welcome here anytime, Zhenya,” Seryozha said. “No matter what. You don’t need to worry about where you stand with us.” 

“But Russia--” 

Seryozha scoffed on the other end of the line. “We love Russia, Zhenya, but we don’t love everything about Russia. Besides, I really don’t think they’re going to arrest us for having you over for dinner. I mean it. Let us know if there’s anything you need.” 

“I can’t imagine that there’s anything I need,” Zhenya said. 

“What are you going to do with your summer?” Seryozha asked. 

And there it was, Zhenya thought: one of the things that had been skating around the edge of his consciousness, one of the things he’d been pushing away. When he’d booked his ticket for going back to Russia for the summer, he’d allotted two weeks after the Cup final. He’d thought it would be enough time no matter what happened. Time to celebrate if they were successful, time to mourn and then regroup if they weren’t. He hadn’t remotely reckoned on winning and needing to lick his wounds anyway. He’d thought about changing his flight, but then he hadn’t done it, probably because right at the moment of wavering someone had dragged him on to the next bar. He could wait to lick his wounds once he got home to Russia, he’d figured. 

Only now he wouldn’t be going home to Russia at all. 

“I’ll come up with something,” Zhenya said. He didn’t have the first clue what the something would be. 

*

_September 2016 - earlier in June 2017_

They’d had nine months. Nine good months. Nine months where they spent as much of their time together as they could. They tried so hard not to take risks, not to give anyone a reason to suspect they were anything other than the friends they’d always been. Zhenya never would have thought that ten years of friendship would be the cover it was, but no one seemed to question him and Sid spending extra time together. People seemed to assume that, if anything, they were cementing their plans for leading the Pens to their best season yet. No one dared jinx it, but the whole season long it was in the back of everyone’s head: they’d won the Cup in 2016; maybe, just maybe, 2017 could also be their year.

The funny thing was, a decent amount of the time, they actually were making plans for the team. Sid had always liked using Zhenya as a sounding board for his ideas and Zhenya had always liked playing that role. So the people who thought that was what they were doing weren’t even all the way wrong.

There was just the fact that even more than planning total hockey domination, Sid and Zhenya were spending an enormous amount of time fucking.

It had actually kind of surprised him, how quickly the sex got good. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised him. As much time as they spent on the ice together, they were both experts at reading each other. Hockey was three parts body and one part magic; of course that would translate to sex. Probably some of sex was always like this, when you were with someone you had sex with more than once. He’d never had sex with the same person before, but it made sense that there had to be some benefit to sleeping with just one person over and over.

But it couldn’t all be that this was just what regular sex was like. If it was this good for everyone, he couldn’t imagine how anyone was able to hold down a job. The only reason he felt like he could do his job was because the sex seemed to be lighting his hockey up. Sid was the same way: good sex only seemed to make his hockey better.

That was how they’d justified spending as much time fucking as they did. It was a cycle of constantly getting better, at hockey, at sex, at everything.

They just had to hope that they could be smart enough not to get caught.

* 

_June 2017_

The day he was supposed to fly out arrived and he didn’t get on his flight to Russia. Someone from the Pens front office harangued the airline into reimbursing the cost of the flight, which Zhenya found out about from his credit card alerts. He put himself through the most punishing upper body weights routine he knew and then took himself on a hot, humid, miserable run so he’d maybe be exhausted enough to not think about what he should have been doing today instead.

That took him through lunchtime. He was just debating what he was going to scrounge in the freezer for his lunch when the doorbell rang.

At this point, he wasn’t honestly surprised by the fact that it was Sid.

Sid came bearing gifts: pizza from the place that Sid considered to be total garbage and that Zhenya inexplicably loved. It was greasy and tasted vaguely of cardboard and for no reason Zhenya could even discern he enjoyed the crap out of it.

“Have you had lunch yet?” Sid asked.

In early June, so long ago that it felt like a different lifetime, they’d shared their travel plans with each other. Sid was going home to Canada this year, taking some time off from skating; Zhenya was heading to Russia, of course. At the time Zhenya had thought that three months sounded like a long time not to see Sid. He’d thought about asking if Sid would come back to Pittsburgh early. He’d thought vaguely that they could spend the end of the summer in Pittsburgh together, but he’d also thought they had plenty of time to figure that out. He’d thought he’d just change his return flight, later.

All of that was irrelevant, now.

“You don’t need to be here, Sid,” Zhenya told him.

“You want a beer?”

Zhenya hadn’t actually touched a drop of alcohol since that night in the bar. He considered for a moment. “One.”

They brought the pizza and beer into the living room and Sid turned the TV on. It would have been nice if there were some kind of hockey to watch. You could count on Sid to fall into a nice distracting patter about hockey whenever it was available to him because Sid just couldn’t help picking apart every game he ever watched. But actually the TV was on HGTV, one of those house search shows that Zhenya inevitably got sucked into. They were like drugs: Sid was getting drawn in right along with him.

“Are they really that concerned about the finishes, to the point of not buying the house?” Sid asked.

“Is very offensive molding,” Zhenya said easily.

For a few minutes everything felt just about normal, which was why he got caught off guard by Sid asking, “Have you thought about what you’re going to do for the summer?”

Before Zhenya could even open his mouth, Sid continued, “Because I’ve got an idea.”

Zhenya made a go-on motion. “What’s your idea?”

“You could come to Halifax with me,” Sid said.

Sid had invited Zhenya to Halifax before, more than once, but it had been years ago. Zhenya had always figured that Sid made the invitation in the same spirit that Zhenya did, when he said that Sid should come see him in Russia sometime. They both meant the invitations seriously, of course, but neither of them seriously expected the other to take them up on it, at least not before they retired. 

Zhenya could think of about a million reasons to say no to Sid now, but ultimately, what else was he going to do? It wasn’t like he’d ever stayed in the North America for the summer before.

“Okay.”

From Sid’s face he’d been expecting Zhenya to dig in his heels. “Okay,” Sid said, half a question. “Okay. Good.”

“Yeah, Sid?”

“Yeah, yeah, for sure.” Sid ran a hand through his hair. Zhenya followed the motion helplessly. “Definitely good, because I already booked your flight.”

Zhenya gaped. He should have known that this would be the way things would go. Sid had caught him off guard, but Zhenya should have known that Sid wouldn’t let him ruin his summer training, no matter what happened.

*

Going to Halifax with Sid was the path of least resistance. It was also spectacularly dumb, but then again, not the actual dumbest thing he’d already done this summer.

Besides, he needed to be doing something, and Sid wasn’t wrong that Zhenya hadn’t taken the time to make alternate arrangements to make up for the fact that he wouldn’t be training in Russia. Going with Sid would actually make things really easy: he’d be fed good food, get in good workouts, and not have to plan a thing. There was no one on this earth more capable of making solid hockey-related off-season plans than Sidney Crosby.

When Zhenya told him he’d go, Sid gave him the first real smile Zhenya had seen out of him since right after they won the Cup, and Zhenya had tamped down the feeling that spending the summer with Sid was a terrible decision after all. What else was he going to do, sit around Pittsburgh and mope? Eat nothing but potato chips? Better to go with Sid and let him take care of Zhenya’s hockey. It was the best thing to do, even if it ended up eviscerating him.

*

The thing he hadn’t really thought through was that he’d be staying in the same house as Sid all summer. He’d been happy to let Sid take care of that, too, but in retrospect maybe that hadn’t been the smartest plan. He tried to talk to Sid about it. 

“I’m not sure is good idea for you and me to be living together, Sid.”

Sid waited a beat, as though he thought Zhenya had more to say, which was unfortunate because that was as far as Zhenya had gotten in his reasoning.

“What Twitter going to say?” Zhenya tried.

“Nobody really bothers me out here,” Sid said. “Geno. You don’t need to worry about living with me. It’s for training. No one will be paying much attention.”

*

No one bothered them at Sid’s house in Enfield. MacKinnon came home too, to train with Sid, and there was a scheduled media thing the first day so Zhenya just took it off and slept in. 

Sid didn’t seem bothered by sharing a house with him, but then Sid liked having roommates. Zhenya had seen pictures of the outside of Sid’s summer house when he bought it, but didn’t have an idea of how big it was, how close it could feel with the two of them there, even with the ample space it afforded. Zhenya had almost expected it to be laughably oversized, like Sid’s Pittsburgh house. Sid had never been able to do real estate like a normal person.

The smart thing to do, now that he knew what he was getting into with Sid’s house, would have been to move out. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t afford to rent a place for the summer.

But he didn’t do it. It was probably stupid. Actually, no: it was definitely stupid. But even if he couldn’t have Sid, it was nice to be around him, no matter how dumb that made Zhenya.

*

_September 2016 - October 2016_

The night they first hooked up was also the only time either of them ever stayed over at the other’s house. It was too risky. Sid agreed with him.

The second time they hooked up, Sid was the one to make the first move. He texted after practice: _want to come over and watch a movie?_

Zhenya told himself that maybe a movie really did mean a movie. That was enough plausible deniability to propel him to Sid’s house. As soon as Sid opened the door and his eyes went straight to Zhenya’s mouth, all of that plausible deniability flew out the window. They didn’t even make it to the bed that time.

By the third time, there wasn’t a lot of plausible deniability left.

By the sixth time Zhenya decided that it was ridiculous that he was still keeping a tally. Obviously this wasn’t something that was stopping.

They didn’t talk about it, exactly. But some rules emerged nonetheless. Nobody stayed over. They didn’t do anything on road trips. They didn’t text each other anything explicit, anything that could mean anything at all. They didn’t leave the rink together or share a car.

There wasn’t anything obvious about what they were doing, Zhenya told himself. There wasn’t any way for anyone to figure it out.

*

_late June 2017_

Zhenya stayed in the house with Sid. On some level he felt like he wasn’t doing the right thing by being in Halifax, but Sid seemed to have taken it as his captainly duty to make sure Zhenya made it through the summer not only in one piece but in as close to prime hockey condition as could possibly be expected. That came as no surprise. That was the reason Zhenya had let Sid talk him into coming along in the first place. Hockey was a good thing to have as his goal. It was the only thing, right now, and even if working hard on his training wouldn’t make the season begin any earlier, it would at least ensure that he was as ready as he could possibly be once it arrived.

The summer settled into a rhythm of training and rest days. In the evenings they usually ate dinner together. They stopped at the grocery store most days on the way home, mostly because Sid liked his vegetables to be as fresh as possible and Zhenya could never tell when a post practice cookie was going to be absolutely necessary. 

When they weren’t eating or training or stopping at the store, he’d mostly been trying to leave Sid alone. They weren’t anything, now. There wasn’t any reason for him to strain at the door, to want to just be near Sid. And for all that they were spending nearly all of their time together, Sid was doing an admirable job of leaving Zhenya alone.

But one night Sid said to him, “Geno. I know you’re watching the same crap I am. Watch in the living room with me.”

If Sid was the one to suggest it, Zhenya thought, then it was okay.

So that was the new routine. They ate dinner together, watched TV together. Sometimes they talked about that day’s workout together. They went to bed alone.

It wasn’t much use telling himself that he wished it were otherwise.

*

Summer looked good on Sid. It was like the whole province of Nova Scotia was in on the plan to just make Sid feel like a normal guy for most of the time. It wasn’t that they didn’t recognize him, because they did. But everyone was just normal around him, and Zhenya could see why he liked coming home so much. 

Sid had a pier behind the house that he fished off of a lot of mornings, even mornings they were going to be training. Zhenya woke up with him a few times, but only on off days and only on days he truly felt prepared to withstand the sleepy, soft, and comfortable Sid that was early morning Sid. 

The workouts were brutal, naturally. Zhenya wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. The more exhausted he was, the more successfully he could keep his focus on the present, keep his head in Halifax and not let his thoughts wander toward his own home. 

He still called his parents. Not too often, because he didn’t want them to get in trouble, and he couldn’t help worrying that there was still a risk even with the supposed anonymity of the internet. But sometimes he called them, and when he did he couldn’t help thinking about where he was supposed to be. He did his best not to talk about it with them, and in return he could hear them keeping things out of the conversation, too. They didn’t mention the names of a number of their friends and acquaintances in Magnitogorsk, people who would have ordinarily come up in phone calls, and Zhenya had a good idea of what that meant. His choices reflected on his family, of course. Not everyone would be willing to risk that association.

His parents didn’t talk about the reason for their ostracization, either, except for once. Even then, they would only make oblique references.

His father said, “We understand, now, why you never told us before.” He paused to let that sink in. “But we want you to know that, if there is someone, if there is ever someone, we’ll welcome that person. We want you to be happy, Zhenya.”

Zhenya found that he couldn’t speak, could only nod in tacit acknowledgement. He was pretty sure that they understood what it meant to him, how grateful he was that with all that he’d lost, he wouldn’t lose them, too.

*

Sid grilled a bunch of times, often on the nights when they weren’t scheduled for a particularly gruelling early morning workout the next day. He’d invite MacKinnon over once a week or so, and whoever of MacKinnon’s friends were in town. None of them ever really drank much -- what was the point, when there would only be terrible suffering during workouts as the result? -- but they did take rest days once a week, to recover, and nobody worried too much about having a few beers then.

Which was what was happening when one of Nate’s friends meandered over to Zhenya on the deck and said, “So how many people have tried to set you up with their gay cousin so far?”

Zhenya choked on his beer and sputtered. The guy helpfully thumped him on the back.

“Easy, easy. I don’t have a gay cousin,” he said. “Pretty sure you can do better than that guy in the video, though.”

Zhenya still hadn’t finished trying to drown by swallowing the wrong way, but he could still glare daggers at this guy. Finally he recovered enough to say, “I don’t want to date your cousin even if he’s gay.”

“Somebody else’s cousin, then.”

“No cousins,” Zhenya said firmly.

Blessedly, before he could say anything else, the universe showed him mercy in the form of Nate. “Leave the man alone, D.”

The guy tried to protest something or other, but Nate redirected him toward the grill, claiming Sid needed his help. Once he was firmly out of range, Nate said, “I’m sorry, he’s had a few beers already. I’m pretty sure if you want help with anything, you’ll ask for it, yeah? Good. I’ll make sure he leaves you alone.”

From across the room Zhenya saw Sid looking at him. For the briefest of moments, Zhenya met Sid’s gaze, then looked back at Nate.

“Thanks,” Zhenya said.

“No problem.”

*

They also saw Sid’s parents a lot, more than Zhenya had in twelve years of playing with him. Zhenya was nervous about it at first, because they knew about him, and he knew they knew about Sid, and he wondered how many conclusions they were drawing about them on their own, no matter how false they were at this point. 

But whatever they suspected, they were blissfully normal. Troy would show up when they started the on-ice practices and give them both feedback and pointers. Trina brought them jars of homemade soup and spaghetti sauce whenever she stopped by. She knew they could feed themselves, and she knew how ruthlessly Sid balanced his diet. “Hers is just better,” Sid said when Zhenya asked why she kept bringing them food. 

Which Zhenya couldn’t really argue with. 

She’d also, maybe two or three weeks into the summer, caught Zhenya alone one afternoon, when Sid was in town running errands and Zhenya had needed some space. Sid’s parents knew why he was here, the whole of hockey knew why Zhenya couldn’t go back to Russia, but they hadn’t really talked about it. 

Zhenya let her in to drop off this week’s jars and pick up the ones they’d used and washed. As he was helping her get everything back into the car, she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Have you been able to talk to your parents at all?” 

“Some,” he said. 

“How are they?” she asked, and Zhenya knew she meant how are they handling everything. 

“No problems yet, I think.” 

“This must be hard for them,” she said. Zhenya felt a shot of hot guilt rush through him and she must have seen the look on his face because she quickly said, “No, I mean. I’m sorry. I mean if it were Sid I’d want to be there, I’d want to help shelter him. I’d want to hug him and tell him it’ll be okay. You never stop being our children, you know?”

Zhenya had to fight back tears as she hugged him then. “I know,” he said. He waved at her as she drove off and he wondered if the soup and the spaghetti sauce was really for Sid, or if Trina was subbing in for a mother that was thousands of miles away. 

*

It wasn’t supposed to have been serious, with Sid. They were teammates, colleagues. They were around each other all the time at the rink. They were friends, and nothing about that was going to change just because they were fucking. There wasn’t anything beyond the sex.

He wasn’t honestly sure, in retrospect, what mental acrobatics had let him convince himself that whatever was happening with Sid was casual. Clearly neither of them had been treating it that way. But he _had_ believed it. Because it had been convenient to believe. Because it meant everything could stay just as it was with the addition of regular sex with another man, which was the best possible outcome Zhenya could hope for, save for an understanding wife, and children who would never know the truth about their father.

He’d been an idiot. Sid had, for all intents and purposes, been his boyfriend. The fact that they hadn’t ever talked about it in those terms didn’t make it any less true.

He was around Sid all the time this summer, and still he missed him. He hadn’t realized how much of Sid he’d had, before.

*

_January 2017_

They stopped using condoms after their bye week.

Sid had been the one to bring it up, and the way he’d done it hadn’t pinged any of Zhenya’s warning signs, though in retrospect it should have. But Sid had made it seem like it was about convenience.

Convenience had sounded good as a reason, as a nice, careful lie they could both believe. When actually, the whole time, they’d been in deep, and Zhenya hadn’t even known it.

*

_July 2017_

The call finally came in late July.

“Russia has banned you from all international competition,” Gennady said. “We’re expecting to hear about the full legal ramifications soon.”

Zhenya didn’t need to hear about the full legal ramifications, though he knew he would be hearing about them regardless of what he wanted. There wasn’t going to be any way of avoiding it. The thing was, nothing they did was going to change anything for him, really. He already knew he wasn’t going home.

When Zhenya came downstairs, Sid was parked in front of the TV, eating some kind of stir-fry with chicken and watching the Food Network with too much interest.

“You overhear my conversation?” Zhenya guessed.

“Geno,” Sid said, and all of a sudden Zhenya realized he was having a panic attack. He couldn’t get enough air and his heart was thudding wildly. “Geno, sit down, easy,” Sid was saying, like he was a skittish animal, and he probably was, because all of the thoughts he’d been so carefully not thinking for weeks were crashing back to the front of his mind: he wasn’t going home, he wasn’t going to be able to go home, he wasn’t ever going to be able to go back…

“Breathe,” Sid said, and distantly Zhenya registered that Sid was rubbing circles on his back. “Breathe deep, Geno. You’re going to be okay.”

 _I’m really not_ , Zhenya thought, but he let Sid talk him down anyway, until it wasn’t a real panic attack but only the ghost of one, the after-image. Distantly he registered that this was the first time Sid had touched him since the night they’d won the Cup. Sid kept rubbing his back until Zhenya’s breathing had settled all the way, and even afterwards Zhenya was drawn toward him.

“Did you have dinner yet?” Sid asked.

Sid herded him into the kitchen and settled him at the breakfast bar, then made teriyaki salmon and greens and rice. Zhenya fed himself dumbly. Sid was right to make him eat. Food helped; it always did.

When Zhenya had finished eating, Sid caught his eye.

“I’m so sorry, Geno. I know--actually, I don’t know what Russia means to you, but I know it means a lot.”

“I don’t want to talk right now,” Zhenya said. What he wanted was for Sid to fuck him into oblivion, but that wasn’t happening. He settled for the next best thing.

“I’m going to go shower,” Zhenya said.

He turned the water scalding hot, soaped up his dick, then jerked off furiously, thinking about what it would be like if it was Sid’s hand on his dick instead. Sid like he used to be, when they weren’t so careful with each other; when they hadn’t been thinking about how much there was to lose.

He stayed under the spray until the bathroom was a choked jungle of steam and his skin was splotchy and red. He hadn’t let himself jerk off thinking about Sid all summer, but now that he’d started he couldn’t imagine there being a reason to stop. He couldn’t think of a better possible distraction.

He got out the lube he’d pretended he hadn’t packed and positioned himself on the bed, teasing his opening with light strokes at first, the way he liked to do when he was getting ready for Sid, when Sid was watching.

He slid his index finger in slowly, pretending Sid _was_ watching. If Sid were watching, Zhenya would stick with one finger until the point that he couldn’t take it anymore and needed more pressure. Then he’d pull the first finger almost all the way out and slide two fingers in, scissoring himself open, so slow it would look lazy, leaving his prostate barely touched until later. Then, when Sid’s pupils were blown with wanting Zhenya, he’d start to work himself in earnest, fucking his fingers into himself. He could come like this if he wanted to, and he had before, with Sid watching him, Zhenya losing his mind over how Sid would buck into his own fist watching Zhenya come.

Zhenya was picturing it now, picturing how easy it would be for Sid to open the door and see Zhenya spread open like this, spread open just for him. As soon as he’d imagined Sid into the room, it was over quickly. He brought himself right to the edge by mercilessly hitting his prostate and then barely touched his cock before he was shooting all over his stomach.

He felt obscurely guilty afterwards, like he shouldn’t be thinking of Sid like that. Sid wasn’t his anymore; he shouldn’t be fantasizing things like that. He’d only make himself feel worse.

But he also felt like he’d come hard enough to make himself sleep, which had been the goal, after all. After the most perfunctory of clean-ups, he slept.

*

Sid’s day with the Cup was scheduled for late July. In the past, Zhenya knew, he’d taken it with him everywhere, to the coffee shop, to the grocery store, to the rink, visited a couple of schools, and then had the parade. 

“I come with you for regular parts of day,” Zhenya told him when Sid asked. “But I don’t go in parade with you.” He was already second-guessing whether it was a good idea to be seen with Sid on his Cup day at all, but he figured it was better to stick to routine even when Lord Stanley would be joining them. He was probably being too paranoid in thinking that people would read anything into his presence in Cole Harbour on Sid’s Cup day in particular, since it was no secret that he was here for the summer. But the last thing he wanted right now was to draw too much attention to himself.

Sid accepted the deal with only a few attempts at cajoling. 

Phil, the keeper of the Cup, told Zhenya quietly that he was sorry he wouldn’t be seeing Russia again this summer, and made plans to come to Pittsburgh for Geno’s day at the end of August. Zhenya shook his hand, trying not to think about what he’d planned for his Cup day originally and how different it would be now. 

Sid, Zhenya, Phil, and the Cup went for a light workout and out for coffee afterwards. As soon as people caught sight of Sid and Lord Stanley enjoying some Tim Horton’s, the first real crowds of the day began to gather. Just looking at them, Zhenya began to sweat. He had thought he would be fine, that he could just let himself melt into the background of Sid’s day, but he’d thought wrong. He stuck around until his coffee was finished and then told Sid, “See you back at house later, okay?” Mercifully, Sid just nodded, and headed out into the throng for photos and autographs and the general adoration of his hometown. 

The first time they’d won, Zhenya had taken the Cup with him to Magnitogorsk. Last year, he’d brought the Cup to Moscow, to the Kremlin, to the new Hockey Hall of Fame in Moscow. This year, he’d had visions of his parade through Moscow, eating pelmeni out of the Cup, pouring in the best vodka and passing it around to all his friends, enjoying all the attention he could find. But instead of all that, he’d be in Pittsburgh, celebrating quietly at home, trying to attract as little attention as he possibly could. 

*

The next day was a rest day. Sid made them both gigantic egg white omelets with spinach and chicken sausage. Zhenya sleepwalked through making and drinking his tea and was just beginning to wake up when he noticed Sid looking at him.

“Did you have good day with Lord Stanley?” Zhenya said finally. 

“Yeah,” Sid said. “It would have been better if you were there.” 

“I couldn’t,” Zhenya said. He was trying to figure out how to elaborate, when Sid caught his eye.

“In June, after you told me no,” Sid began. Zhenya froze. He didn’t even need to ask which conversation Sid was referring to. There was only one “no” that mattered. “I was only really mad at you for about a week.”

Zhenya stared. “Really?”

“The righteous anger at being dumped turned out to be unsustainable, in the long term,” Sid said wryly. “But actually I started thinking about how I never really thought about what it would have meant for you, if you were out in Pittsburgh.

“And I knew things were bad in Russia, if you’re gay. But I guess I never really got it, why it was such a big deal for you. It never really mattered to me where I was, so long as I could play the best hockey I could by being there. And for the past ten years, that place has been in Pittsburgh, with you. And I love Pittsburgh, I really do, but if we had to move the team out of Pittsburgh, I don’t think I would mind, either, because I’d still be there with this team. With you. But that’s not what it’s like for you.”

“It’s like that for me some,” Zhenya said slowly. “I want to play best hockey in the world, and if team moves away from Pittsburgh I follow. I not miss Pittsburgh so much, you know? But Russia…”

“That part’s different for you. And I’ve known that for a long time. You always go back to Russia, every summer. And not just to visit family or for a place to get away. You talk about Russia all the time. And for you to not be able to do that...” Sid shrugged. “I tried to think about if it were me and Canada, and I think as long as I could see my family, if they would keep coming to visit like they do, I’d be okay.”

Zhenya could see that, pretty easily. Sid might be sad, but he’d be all right. But it was different for Zhenya. Even if his family came to visit him, he would still want to go to Russia, for the language and the food that tasted right and the absolutely awful weather and the people who drove the way he did. He wouldn’t ever stop wanting that.

Sid paused a beat, then continued, “But I also know you want some things you weren’t ever going to be able to have in Russia. If you were gay, with the laws being what they were.”

Zhenya held his breath as Sid said, “I know you want kids, Geno.”

His heart ached to hear someone else say that out loud. He’d always been so committed to not letting his biggest secret slip that it had been too hard to keep his longing to become a father from bleeding through at the edges. And it was all right, anyway, maybe even a good thing, if people knew he wanted kids. Then they assumed that he wanted to get married to a woman and have kids with her. Which he did want. He’d tried really, really hard to want it, anyway.

He’d honestly thought he could make it work, with a woman: getting married, having kids, the whole thing. He’d thought Oksana would be it for him, until her life in Russia was more important. He’d been lucky with her, it turned out. Because Anna had laser vision and no hesitation about speaking her mind, and she figured him out quick.

“I didn’t come to the United States to marry a fag,” she’d said, and he’d wondered how she’d worked it out. He’d been so careful, always, but especially around her. He hadn’t thought there was anything for her to see.

But all of his secrets seemed to be hanging out these days. He felt raw, open. He pulled himself back to Sid, who was saying:

“When I was talking to you, the night of the Cup win, I thought maybe eventually,” Sid said carefully, “we might have kids someday. You and me.”

“Oh,” Zhenya said. “You said that?”

“No,” Sid said ruefully. “I was thinking it, but -- well. We didn’t get that far in the conversation.”

Zhenya remembered the whole thing less as a conversation and more as a terrified rush of everything falling apart around him. When he thought back on it, all he could remember of it was Sid telling Zhenya that he needed impossible things.

Sid was saying, “I know things are a mess right now. I just wanted you to know that I hope you get good things. You deserve them.”

Zhenya looked at Sid for a long moment. “You too, Sid,” he said finally. 

“Anyway,” Sid said, and trailed off. Eventually he looked away from Zhenya’s face and returned to his omelet. Zhenya did the same.

*

_early June 2017_

They’d fallen apart the same way they’d come together: drunk and fast and decisive.

Back-to-back Cup wins: it had felt like the validation of everything they’d been working toward, ten years of effort and longing and dogged good luck.

They’d started drinking on the ice and carried on into the locker room, and they were drunk, of course they were, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like they could fly if they wanted to, and when Sid approached him Zhenya didn’t even think, just pulled him in tight and kissed him sloppily on the cheek, the way he’d kissed Flower and Kessel just a few minutes before. He’d never stopped acting like this around Sid, on the idea that people would notice more if he stopped. There wasn’t anything particularly noticeable about kissing Sid’s cheek like that, nothing that should have pinged anyone’s attention. Nothing abnormal, except that Sid didn’t move away. He stayed, leaning into the touch, and said, low, “I want to kiss you so bad right now.”

Zhenya, who was cautious but also only human, couldn’t help replying, “Me too, Sid.”

“We could, you know.”

Zhenya responded by smacking another big wet kiss on Sid’s cheek for good measure. “There,” he said. “Two Cup wins, two kisses!”

Sid swatted at him but stayed plastered to Zhenya’s side. “I mean it. We could do this for real. You and me.”

Zhenya pulled away to look at him through the haze of alcohol. Everything stayed okay just long enough for him to realize that Sid wasn’t actually joking.

“I want to do this for real with you,” Sid said. “I want this to be real.”

And there it was: the thing he’d successfully not talked about for nine months, the reason the whole thing with Sid was always going to end in disaster. Zhenya had known, hadn’t he, that eventually Sid was going to want something Zhenya wouldn’t be able to give him. And here, on the night of their second Cup win in two years, the culmination of all their talent and timing and effort and all that luck, here was the thing he would never be able to outrun: He could have hockey. He could have Sidney. He could have Russia. But he would never be able to have all three. And when it came down to it, he’d already decided which two he was going to take.

“Sid, we’re in the locker room,” Zhenya said, scrambling for good reasons not to have this conversation right now. “We win the Cup! Let’s get drinks, Sid.”

Sid let Zhenya herd him toward the bottles of champagne someone had brought into the locker room, but after that Sid swung out into the hallway and toward one of the conference rooms.

Zhenya followed him, helpless. Maybe he could convince Sid to just drink; maybe he could talk talk Sid out of having this conversation. Maybe they would be able to come back down from this. Maybe nothing would have to change, and Sid would forget that this had even happened in the morning, and they could leave separately like they always did but meet up later...

And then Sid closed the door of the conference room and set his jaw, and Zhenya’s blood froze.

“I think we need to talk about this. This is--” Sid swallowed. “This is a big deal. I want to be with you. In a relationship. I want it to be something people know about.”

“You know that isn’t something we can do, Sid.”

“Why not?”

“You really not know? You not know what Russia is like?”

“I know about the laws,” Sid said. “But they don’t matter here.”

“What do you mean, they don’t matter here? Here, you mean Pittsburgh?” Zhenya wasn’t following where Sid was going with the conversation.

“Well, yeah,” Sid said, in what seemed to be honest confusion. “I thought--”

“What you thought?”

Sid squeezed his eyes shut then opened them again. “I thought we’d stay in Pittsburgh forever, okay? I thought we’d play here forever and we’d retire here.”

“But I was always going back to Russia,” Zhenya said.

“Where? Moscow? Magnitogorsk?”

It was going to sound wrong if he said he hadn’t thought about it, but that was the honest truth. Russia, generally, was the plan. The specifics of where had been something he’d always figured he could work out once he retired. For the whole time he’d been thinking that he’d never worked Sid into the equation, and he still couldn’t find a way to do that now; but retirement had always been a long way off, and he had avoided thinking about it.

“Specific place is not so important,” Zhenya said. “I live in Russia, okay? It’s always the plan to live in Russia.”

“And you wouldn’t ever change that plan? Not for anything?” Sid’s face was purpling with frustration. “Not for me?”

“So what you think, I never want to go back to Russia? I stay here in Pittsburgh forever, no summer, nothing?” He could feel his English deteriorating as his volume rose.

“You’ve lived here for a decade, Geno. You own a house here. You have your team here. I’m here.”

He wished desperately that he could just start talking in Russian and have Sid understand him, but he knew Sid would lose his shit if Zhenya switched to Russian now, so he stuck with his stupid-sounding English. “Pittsburgh nice place, good people, Sid! But it’s not home!”

Sid was red-faced now, furious. “So all of this, everything we’ve built, it doesn’t matter to you as much as a country you haven’t lived in for over a decade?”

“You have absolutely no idea what Russia means to me,” Zhenya said in a glorious rush. He’d broken into Russian after all. In English all he said was: “Yes.”

Sid recoiled as though Zhenya had hit him. “Then I guess that’s how it is, then,” Sid said. And then he walked away.

Somehow Zhenya got home. He had no idea what hour it was, because somehow in the process of trying to leave the arena he’d gotten caught up in the celebration again and kept drinking. He’d gotten shitfaced enough that by the end of the night he wasn’t thinking about what had happened with Sid at all.

When he woke up the next morning, some small, delusional part of him had still hoped that things would look different. That Sid would text him and they’d make a plan for later, that they’d still be as they’d been. But most of him had known better.

*

_August 2017_

Nothing had changed about the situation with Russia, but the wheels had come off the bus when it came to fantasizing about Sid.

He’d known it was a bad idea to let himself picture Sid while getting off. The rest of the time they were in Halifax Zhenya was on that like it was his full-time job. Sometimes he would look at Sid and think Sid had to know. It didn’t matter how clearly Zhenya knew in his head that he and Sid were broken up; his dick still hadn’t ever gotten the message. He was grateful when the summer finally ended and they started making plans for heading back to Pittsburgh. Not only was it going to be the start of the hockey season, and with it a return to some semblance of normalcy, but also Zhenya was going to be going home to a house that didn’t have Sid in it, so he could maybe start weaning himself off the desire to jerk off while thinking about Sid at any given minute. Or maybe, who was he kidding, just be in a house where he could yell Sid’s name when he came without needing to worry that Sid might overhear.

Sid’s parents dropped them off at the airport. Troy shook his hand and Trina hugged them both and slipped a bag of cookies into Zhenya’s hand. The flight was short and uneventful and Zhenya spent most of it listening to music on his phone and cancelling out the plane noises around him. 

At the baggage claim in Pittsburgh, Sid asked if Zhenya wanted to come over for dinner, since he had another jar of sauce in his checked baggage (assuming it survived) and Zhenya’s house had been empty for months.

“It’s okay, Sid. Really. I have lots of thing I need to do at home,” Zhenya said. It was kind of true. He could find things to do, anyway. Usually when he came back from the summer he liked to spend a little while adjusting to being in Pittsburgh before he dove into the season. He liked to have some time to get back into the rhythm of America, speaking and hearing English all the time. His English wasn’t so much a problem this year, but he still liked the idea of following this part of his normal pre-season routine.

So he organized his things, got his regular cleaning service going again, went to the grocery store, swung by his regular take-out restaurants. He’d already been to a couple places before he remembered that the guys there, these guys, they knew about him now. They were Pittsburgh guys, and they knew him. They’d congratulated him when he got engaged to Anna. They wouldn’t have missed the news about the video.

Just having remembered was enough to make him nervous before going in the deli. The owner had always been great to him, a huge fan. He was a beefy red-faced Irish guy named Pat with a huge beard who liked to remind Zhenya that the Flyers should go fuck themselves. Zhenya had always thought the guy was hilarious, and he was the one working behind the counter today.

Well, if Pat was going to treat him any differently, it would be better to find out now than later. Zhenya schooled his face into pleasant neutrality and went inside.

Pat looked up and yelled, “Geno! Good to see you back! What can I get you?”

“Corned beef.”

“Extra pickle?”

Zhenya nodded.

“Heard you were in Halifax this summer,” Pat said casually. “How’d it go?”

So he definitely knew, then. But he wasn’t acting any different. Zhenya exhaled and said, “Good. Sid makes me work hard, you know? All training, all day.”

“Good for the season, I’m sure. Canada’s nice. My partner, he’s from the Toronto area. We keep talking about spending more time up north, after we retire.”

He spoke casually enough that Zhenya was grateful to have spent the summer in a pressure cooker of intense English speaking. If he’d been coming off a regular English-free summer he might not have caught what Pat was saying.

The shop was empty other than Zhenya.

“How long have you and your partner been together?” Zhenya said slowly.

Pat grinned. “Fifteen years in October.” He pulled his phone out to show Zhenya a picture of Pat with his arm around the shoulders of a shorter man who was looking up at Pat adoringly.

“Anyway, you’re waiting on that sandwich,” Pat said. “One corned beef, extra pickle, coming right up.”

Zhenya decided he’d be eating a lot of sandwiches this year.

*

Zhenya’s Cup day came, and with it plenty of Ksenia’s good Russian food and the best vodka Seryozha could arrange to have imported. A good number of the NHL Russians had decided that even if they weren’t comfortable with the consequences of supporting Zhenya publicly with their words, they were deeply committed to supporting him privately with Cup day vodka. Zhenya invited all the Pens players, coaches, and families who were in town, and he ate pelmeni out of the Cup after all, and afterwards toasted the Pens with vodka in the Cup. His parents had Skyped in for the early part of the party -- he’d scheduled it to start early so that they could be part of it -- and Gennady slung his arm around Zhenya’s shoulders, already a little weepy even though the night was young. 

“We all love you, Zhenya,” Gennady said. “We’re here for you and we want many more years of success for you. In hockey and in life.” 

“I think you need more vodka,” Zhenya told him, hoping that would distract from the suspicious wetness in his own eyes. 

The picture of Zhenya eating pelmeni out of the Cup was the one that Phil chose for the Keeper of the Cup twitter feed, but the photo of Gennady with his arm around Zhenya was Zhenya’s favorite. 

*

Normally Zhenya wouldn’t have reported to training camp right at the beginning, but it was something to get him out of the house, so he went. Sid’s summer of making Zhenya live cleaner than any summer ever before had paid off; Zhenya could hardly remember the last time a pre-season had felt actively easy.

Hockey was the one thing Zhenya could rely on, for himself at least. He remembered veterans talking about the day when they’d first realized that they were getting too old to play, their bodies starting to fail them, but Zhenya wasn’t there yet; bum knee aside, his body felt better than it ever had. The knee was tolerable.

Sid was playing fine, too, maybe not his best year ever, but there were always some adjustments to be made at the start of a season. The rest of the guys were solid, too. The only real problem was that the whole team wasn’t coalescing. It kept seeming like they might become something real, something good, any minute now, and it kept right on not happening. Sid could work miracles on the ice, but making the 2017-2018 Penguins into a threepeat championship team seemed a miracle beyond even Sid.

But hockey was still good, still Zhenya’s favorite thing in the world, still the best thing there was.

It was good that the playing side of hockey was going well, because the rest of his life felt like being eaten by wolves.

The good ol’ USA had managed to forget that it had a gay hockey player while Zhenya wasn’t actually playing hockey, but now that the season was beginning again the reporters were latching onto it and refusing to let go.

Pens publicity was good about making sure plenty of other players stepped up to take some of the attention off Zhenya. Still, he wished he could say what he actually thought rather than Jen’s carefully scripted sound bites.

“Geno! How has being a gay player affected your game?”

_Well, guys, I couldn’t begin to tell you, since I’ve only ever been a gay player. Clearly it can’t have had too negative impact given this is my twelfth season in the NHL._

“Geno! Are you experiencing discrimination on the ice?”

_Not any more than I ever was, which is to say, not really. Actually, a lot of players have kind of backed off on the shit-talking, which is a little bit sad, because it denies me the opportunity to chirp them into next week._

“Geno! Is there anyone special in your life?”

_I’d love to see you hounding the straight guys about that. And anyway the answer is no, not anymore, and probably there never will be, because who wants to put up with this kind of crap? Other than someone who’d just be trying to date me for my fame and my millions. What they don’t know is that my entire fortune is tied up in gay porn._

But of course he could never say any of that, not only because Jen would wring his neck but also because he’d have to say it all in English, and he’d never be able to make it sound charming and flippant but still with an edge to it, the way it sounded in his head. So he stuck with Jen’s careful, bland sound bites instead and took some small satisfaction in the fact that the reporters were going away bored.

*

He honestly had expected more of a difference in the way he’d be chirped during hockey games, but there wasn’t much to it. Most of the guys seemed to genuinely not give a shit, and plenty of them went out of their way to wish him the best. There were a few assholes, but his teammates hadn’t been letting them get away with much. 

As far as the Pens record was concerned, the season wasn’t going as well as last year’s. He shouldn’t have felt surprised. The likelihood of going all the way two years in a row had been slim; three years in a row would have felt greedy, like they were asking for more than they should.

But it was hockey, what he’d longed for all summer. It had been so long since anything had felt like his old life, his normal life, untouched by his own bad choices, and getting to have hockey back after the long strange Colorado summer felt like a gift, no matter how the season was going.

And the front office was happy enough with him, at least, since he was sticking to the script with the reporters.

“We think it would be good if you did an interview, at some point,” Jen said.

Barry agreed. “It would be good PR, now that the initial story has died down.”

Zhenya tamped down his initial impulse to disagree with every suggestion Barry made. “I think about it.”

He did think about it. He thought about it precisely long enough to decide that it was a pretty terrible idea. What was he going to say in an interview, anyway? Nothing that wasn’t public record; nothing that was going to really add to anyone’s experience of the world. He called Jen back later and said, “I don’t think now’s good to do interview, Jen. When I have something to share, then I think about it again.” 

“Okay, Geno,” Jen said, and if she sounded disappointed that wasn’t on him. Anyway, he was off the hook, he figured. He couldn't imagine that he'd ever have anything to share.

*

Meanwhile, Sid kept inviting himself over. Zhenya didn’t want to assume that it was something that was going to keep being normal, but it was hard not to assume it when Sid kept coming by pretty much every off day they had. He wasn’t sure what was worse: the prospect of Sid not coming over anymore, or the near constant state of imminent boner at Sid’s actual presence. Sid, meanwhile, seemed completely at home in Zhenya’s house, and completely oblivious to Zhenya’s state of constant horniness. It was awful. And yet what was Zhenya going to do, tell Sid he didn’t want to see him? Either option sounded like torture.

At least if he let Sid keep coming over he wouldn’t have to explain _why_ he didn’t want Sid coming over. And he also got takeout. If it wasn’t the best of all worlds, it was about the best that he could hope for. 

*

They’d hit a few games where things were going well, or at least well enough: beating Boston in OT and winning more than they were losing, finally starting to feel like they were coming into their stride. 

All Zhenya wanted was a stretch of good games, games where the whole team was clicking. That and for things to be the way they used to be: for him to be able to have Russia again, have Sid again. But all of these things were impossible wishes, maybe in particular his wish for a stretch of good games. The way the season was going so far, they’d be lucky to scrape out whatever wins they could get, let alone go on any kind of a streak.

The week before they were matching up against Washington for the third time in the season, Sid had brought over Zhenya’s favorite shitty pizza and Sid had cued up the Caps-Flyers game. 

“What do you think about our chances?” Sid asked, more or less reading Zhenya’s mind.

“We’ll see.” Most days right now, it felt like the Penguins were six one-man teams that happened to be on the ice at the same time. Then again, hope sprung eternal that the game against the Caps might be the Pens’ lucky day. 

“Ovechkin is playing like garbage right now,” Sid commented. “Are you going to see him next week?”

“Probably.” He could go ahead and upgrade that to a ‘definitely’. Even if he didn’t make plans with him, it was a safe bet that Sasha would turn up. Ordinarily he would have run into Sasha at some point over the course of the summer, but of course this year Zhenya hadn’t been in Russia.

“When he gets here, tell him to get his act together. It’s no fun playing him if he isn’t going to be trying.”

“I don’t know why you think playing Sasha ever is fun.”

“It’s fun when he’s good.”

“Maybe he saving good game for you, Sid,” Zhenya relented.

Sid looked involuntarily pleased at the prospect of Alexander Ovechkin saving his best game play for Sid. That little pleased face was too much for Zhenya to handle. He busied himself with his phone.

The prospect of incoming Sasha made him worried and a little cranky. He hadn’t seen Sasha in ages, but Sasha had been one of the first to reach out to him after the video surfaced in June. Sasha’s text messages had consisted of nothing but a series of eggplant and fireworks emojis, and at the time Zhenya hadn’t dignified that with a response. He was a little afraid to see Sasha now, though. For all that Sasha was a ham, he was also far too astute for his own good.

*

The night before the Capitals game, to Zhenya’s total lack of surprise, he found Alexander Ovechkin on his sofa.

“I’ve gotta tell you, Zhenya, when the news broke, I was surprised.” There was a bottle of vodka open on the coffee table next to a container of what smelled like Sasha’s mom’s homemade borscht.

Zhenya helped himself to the liquor and the soup. “I’d honestly forgotten you had a key,” he said mildly.

“You know what the surprise was, though? Not that you were gay. Everyone knows you’re gay. The surprise was, the news broke and you got caught with some guy who wasn’t Sid.”

Zhenya schooled his face into the most neutral expression he had. He’d been completely right to fear Sasha’s arrival. “What do you mean, everyone knows I’m gay?”

Sasha waved a hand expansively. “Anna. And I’ve had a key for years. I think Gonchar gave it to me.”

None of that really should have surprised him. “She said she wouldn’t talk about it,” he said dumbly.

“She said she wasn’t going to talk to the press about it,” Sasha said, “but I’m pretty sure she talked to every Russian-speaking friend of hers in all of North America.”

The fact that none of them had spoken to the press was kind of dumbfounding. “What did she tell them?”

“That you were in love with Sidney Crosby, of course. Which really anyone with eyes already knew all about. We just didn’t realize it was the kind of love that has actual fucking involved.”

Zhenya just sat there dumbfounded for a solid two seconds. And then he laughed. “Anna had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.”

“Clearly she had some idea of what she was talking about, given how you got caught on video trying to extract that dude’s tonsils with your tongue,” Sasha said.

Zhenya made a vague gesture with his hands. It still made him a little uncomfortable to say it out loud, but there wasn’t much point pretending no one knew. “Okay, sure, she wasn’t wrong about me being gay. But the part with Sid wasn’t true.”

Sasha gave Zhenya a look that showed exactly how much he didn’t believe a word out of his mouth.

“Really,” Zhenya said. “The whole time Anna was in the picture, there wasn’t ever anything at all between me and Sid.”

“But at some other time there was?” Sasha said, honing in like a missile on Zhenya’s neat trick for not lying. “Come, eat some of Mama Ovechkin’s finest borscht and tell your dear friend Sasha all about it. This bottle of vodka isn’t going to drink itself.”

“With you here, I don’t think the bottle needs any help from me,” Zhenya muttered, but he poured himself a generous glass nonetheless. “My mom’s borscht is better anyway.”

Sasha ignored Zhenya’s comments and said, “Cheers. Now let’s hear about all your dumb decisions.”

Before he even began drinking he realized he felt--relieved. Glad that Sasha knew something, even if not nearly all of it. In this whole damned ordeal, the only person he’d been able to talk about Sid with had been Sid himself, and that hadn’t precisely been the best thing for Zhenya’s sanity, for obvious reasons.

After a couple of bottles of vodka, Zhenya was pretty sure there wasn’t a single dumb decision of his that Sasha hadn’t heard about. Clearly he was getting weak if a little vodka was all it took to make him spill his secrets to Sasha.

“Everything makes so much sense now,” Sasha was saying. “I honestly couldn’t understand why you were so miserable after winning the Cup, but now all has been revealed. Did he really dump you on the night you won? Was he so impressed with Anna’s signature move that he decided to start a tradition?”

“We broke up because of a lot of things. Mostly because he wanted things I couldn’t give him.”

For one Sasha didn’t make whatever comment was lurking in his twisted brain, but only made a go-ahead gesture.

“He thought I’d stay in Pittsburgh with him forever,” Zhenya said. “He wanted me to give up Russia. That was always going to be the real problem. Russia and politics and geography. You can’t fix geography.” 

“Did he really want you to give up Russia? I mean, did he say as much?”

“He wanted to tell people.”

Sasha nodded. “Thinking logically, though. He did mean scream it from the rooftops or tell his parents, his sister, and his one sad friend from Shattuck?”

That probably _was_ what Sid had meant, Zhenya realized with an uncomfortable twist of his gut. Nonetheless, Zhenya knew he hadn’t been wrong. “There’s this really great saying. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

Sasha sighed. “You’ve always been so damned dramatic. Sid wasn’t trying to ruin your life, Zhenya. He just wanted to talk about you with literally anyone at all who wasn’t you.”

That was uncomfortably similar to what Zhenya had just been thinking, many glasses of vodka ago, about how nice it was to talk to someone else about Sid.

Sasha was saying, “You know, I get why you wanted to keep things secret then. You weren’t willing to risk the consequences of getting caught. The thing is, Zhenya,” Sasha paused to drape an arm over Zhenya’s shoulder, “I know this isn’t what you would have ever wanted, and though you’ll never hear me say so in public I think our glorious motherland is stone cold wrong with this anti-gay propaganda bullshit. But there is some good to come out of this whole mess for you. The thing is, you’ve already gotten caught. The cat’s out of the bag. All the really terrible consequences of you being gay? You’re already living them. And I can’t imagine it was pleasant, living in fear that someone would find out about you and Sid. You don’t have to be afraid about that anymore.”

“Well, sure, because there isn’t any me and Sid for them to find out about.”

Sasha made a complicated, vaguely frustrated hand-wave. “Why not?”

That threw Zhenya for a loop. “Excuse me?”

“Why the hell are you still broken up with Sid?”

“I don’t follow.”

“I’ll spell it out for you,” Sasha said. “From what I understand, you broke up with Sid because you’d have to give up Russia to stay with him. But that’s not an issue anymore. All of your breakup parameters have become invalid, and yet you’re still broken up. So tell me why.”

Zhenya’s brain hurt. The best he could come up with was, “Because we broke up,” which Sasha ridiculed like the weak attempt it was.

Sasha shook his head in deep pity. “That’s like saying, why is the sky blue? Because it is.”

Zhenya didn’t really have anything to add to that, so it was a good thing Sasha was already on a roll.

“You've spent the whole night basically telling me how much you love and miss Sidney Crosby, and as far as I can tell there's no real reason you shouldn't be with him. Get your act together, Zhenya,” Sasha said.

“I have no idea why I ever thought I liked you.”

Sasha grinned. “I’m a charming motherfucker and you know it. Anyway, let me know if you ever do get back together with your boy. You know how much Nastya likes weddings.”

“The rest of us don’t actually exist on this planet for the purpose of pleasing your wife.”

“No, only I do that,” Sasha said easily.

Zhenya had walked right into that one.

*

Sasha really did fulfill all Sid’s hopes and play his best hockey for Sid the next day. Drinking prodigious amounts of vodka the night before didn’t seem to slow him down in the least. Sid was thrilled.

“Sasha keeps giving me these weird pleased looks,” Sid reported in the locker room during the first intermission. “What the hell is that about?”

Zhenya shrugged but gave Sasha his scariest eyebrows once they were back on the ice.

“I told him that you can’t wait to whisper sweet nothings into his ear,” Sasha said. “I told him you’re going to hold him tight and love him so gently and cry when you get married.”

“In Russian, I assume.”

“Of course! Zhenya, you wound me. Do you really think I’d spoil the moment of you telling him these things yourself?”

Zhenya spent the rest of the game checking Sasha into the boards at every opportunity, out of spite.

At the end of the game, Sasha clutched Sid’s hand with great theatricality and said, “You played a good game, Sidney Crosby! I’m definitely gonna wear my best tux for you!”

“Seriously, any idea what that was about?” Sid said in the locker room later.

“Nope,” Zhenya lied without remorse.

At least the Penguins had won.

Zhenya had been too tired and drunk the night before the game to really think about his conversation with Sasha, because remembering conversations he’d had with Sasha mostly just made his liver hurt. But after the game he couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. Why _was_ he still broken up with Sid? If the best he could come up with as to a reason why was the tautology “we’re not together because we’re not together”, then he could probably stand to do some serious thinking about whether he even agreed with himself.

For all the time Zhenya had spent with Sid since June, it had never occurred to him to question the basic fact of their breakup. The reasons for the breakup had been so sound, so permanent, that it had never occurred to Zhenya that the breakup itself wouldn’t be the same. But since they’d broken up Zhenya’s whole world had changed, only he hadn’t changed his assumptions about what was true, what was possible, to match.

Had Sid? He had to wonder, now. All the way through the summer he’d been able to convince himself that Sid’s presence in his life had been purely out of concern for him as a member of the team, but once they’d been back in Pittsburgh even Zhenya couldn’t believe that the argument held water. There wasn’t any reason for Sid to continue to spend time with him then. Sid had been feeding him dedicatedly all summer and fall and winter, and it hadn’t escaped Zhenya’s notice.

And Zhenya had been thrilled by Sid’s presence. He’d craved it. He’d thought about manufacturing reasons for Sid to come over, but he hadn’t had to. Sid had kept coming over, always. And didn’t that already support Sasha’s theory, that conditions had changed?

Conditions had clearly changed, but Zhenya hadn’t wanted to ask questions. And in retrospect, why not? Why he had been so scared to drag whatever was going on between them into the open? Had he been so afraid that what he wanted didn’t match Sid’s own desires that he’d been willing to settle for whatever Sid would give him if it meant he could get away with not asking questions? But that hadn’t gone well before. That had just led to him hoping things wouldn’t fall apart, and inevitably they had.

If he dragged this into the open, maybe he wouldn’t get what he wanted. Maybe Sid really was just taking care of him as the captain would do for any player. Maybe Sid didn’t want this to be anything more. But now that the conditions had changed, now that Zhenya had found that he _did_ want more, he couldn’t be satisfied with things staying the way they were. And he’d never know what he could actually get if he didn’t talk to Sid.

*

He had to wait until they were back from losing against the Devils, but like clockwork Sid turned up the following evening, bearing Thai food. It had gotten to the point where Sid showing up in the evening had gotten so close to normal that Zhenya expected it, and wasn’t that just more evidence for Sasha’s theory that conditions had changed? 

Still, he watched Sid over dinner. Sid looked at him all the time like -- well. Like the way Sid used to look at him all the time. Like Zhenya was everything. And Zhenya wanted so badly to be deserving of that gaze; it was nearly unbearable. When he thought about the way Sid looked at him, he couldn’t imagine that Sid felt nothing. He remembered how Sid had looked at him during the nine months they’d been together, and Sid still looked at him like that now, still looked at Zhenya like he adored him.

As for Zhenya…it felt like now that the seed of an idea had unfurled in his mind, he couldn’t help knowing that he must look at Sid no differently. Because he loved him. There was no other way to think of it. He hadn’t known, before, that this was what it was. Because he’d needed some sort of possibility in his life before he’d been able to acknowledge that this was what this was. But it felt true, achingly, undeniably.

And for the first time there was some sort of possibility of this going somewhere, for him. For the first time he believed that he might be able to give Sid everything Sid wanted, and that he himself might have good things, too. Now all he needed was to make certain that he wasn’t alone in this. He couldn’t imagine that he was. He hoped he was right.

It was time.

“Sid,” Zhenya said slowly, when they’d finished eating but before they’d cleaned up the dishes. “Why are you keep coming over all the time? Keep bringing me dinner?”

“I like making sure you’re okay,” Sid said, equally slowly, like he was trying to buy himself time to see what turn the conversation was taking.

“You take care of the other guys like this?” Zhenya knew perfectly well that he didn’t. As much time as Sid spent at Zhenya’s, he wouldn’t have had the time to, and anyway Zhenya knew that Sid might have checked on the other guys once or twice but nothing like this, this kind of sustained effort.

“Why do you ask?” Sid said, still stalling.

Zhenya almost didn’t say it, after all. He thought of saying it, then chickened out, then unchickened. Life was short, and if this was something he could maybe have, he was going to have to be brave enough to ask for it. He had a gut-rolling rush of adrenaline at just the thought of saying what he was going to say, and then he said it.

“I don’t want to be broken up with you,” Zhenya said.

His imagination hadn’t taken him far enough to imagine how Sid would react to that, but even if he had imagined it be doubted he would have guessed that Sid would start crying immediately.

“It’s okay, Sid?” Zhenya ventured after a moment. His blood was still pumping and Sid still hadn’t said anything.

“Yeah,” Geno,” Sid managed eventually. “Yeah, it’s good. Me neither. I don’t want to be broken up, either. I never did.”

“I didn’t think I would ever have anything like what you and I had,” Sid continued. “I didn’t think it was possible. And then when it turned out it was possible, I ended up wanting everything. You remember the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie?”

Zhenya knew the book Sid was referring to. It had been one of the ones in Seryozha’s house when Zhenya had first been in America. Seryozha’s daughter Natalie had taken great delight in demonstrating to Zhenya how superior her English skills were. She’d actually been a pretty good teacher: as long as Zhenya framed it like he was appealing to her genius, she was willing to sit patiently with him and explain her English children’s books in great, condescending detail. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie had been a particular favorite, and somehow the team had found out about it. Zhenya had endured some good-natured ribbing about his love of fine children’s literature for a long while thereafter.

“I remember,” Zhenya said.

“I was that mouse,” Sid said. “I got one thing I wanted and then I wanted it all.”

“Greedy,” Zhenya agreed. But he wasn’t the only one. Zhenya knew just what it was to want too much. That was why he hadn’t ever let himself begin to have what he wanted. Until Sid.

“You know, I wasn’t fair to you, Geno,” Sid said. “I’d spent months, actually years, getting ready for the possibility that I might want to come out someday, in some capacity, and then when I sprang it on you and you didn’t immediately agree to what I wanted, I freaked.”

Zhenya nodded, waiting to see if there was more.

“I should have given you some room to decide, or to consider it, anyway. But I thought if you didn’t want what I wanted, right away, it meant you didn’t really care as much as I did. About what we were doing. I thought you didn’t--that I didn’t matter to you as much as you mattered to me. I thought maybe I did matter, but not as much as Russia did, so I was never going to be the thing that mattered most.

“It’s okay, though, Geno. I get it now. I thought I was second choice to Russia, but I was actually second choice to your own happiness. And asking you to put me before your own happiness isn’t fair. I could never expect you to do that, not long-term, not without resenting me. I think that would have been terrible, if you’d done that for me. You would have hated me. You were smart to say no.”

Sid probably wasn’t wrong, about any of it. But none of that was relevant. “It’s okay, Sid. It’s not matter anymore. All that matters is what we want now. What do you want now?”

“Oh God,” Sid said, his voice breaking for real now. “What do you think, Geno?”

After everything, he needed to make sure he got this right. “I think you’re still cookie mouse. The one that wants everything,” Zhenya said. “Me too, Sid.”

Sid looked Zhenya and Zhenya saw all the versions of Sid he’d known, all the well-worn, beloved years, and thought: yes. It was time, now. There wasn’t a single thing worth more to him right now than making Sid happy.

“I love you,” Zhenya said. “I want everything with you. We can be family, Sid. We can make a family.”

Sid tried and failed not to crumple.

“I honestly never thought I’d hear you say that.”

“I never think I can say. So for long time I not even think it. Because if I can’t say, then what’s the point, you know? I don’t want you to get hopes up, right?”

“You’re not going back on this now,” Sid said. “You can’t. I won’t let you.”

All this time, Zhenya had never forgotten that he was the one to take the first step toward Sid, that he’d been the one to open all the doors: to tell Sid he was gay, to touch him first. And maybe he needed to do that one more time.

“It’s okay if I touch you?” Zhenya asked.

Sid answered by kissing him.

“We have more to talk about still, I think,” Zhenya said eventually.

Sid kept on kissing him. “We have time.” He kissed Zhenya carefully, languidly, kissing like a promise, like they would let themselves believe that this was it, that they wouldn’t fuck this up again, that they’d be careful with each other this time.

Sid was being so sweet with him, saying things against his neck like “I wanted this so much” and “I hoped you felt like I did” and “God, I missed you so much.”

“You see me every day,” Zhenya couldn’t help pointing out, contrarily, though he had to agree when Sid replied, “It’s not the same.”

The way they were kissing felt like eventually their bodies would stop being separate and meld together. Zhenya couldn’t get enough of the good animal feeling of Sid’s body against his, the warm softness of his skin. Zhenya wanted to climb on top of him and press him down into the sofa and hold him there forever, just kissing. They hadn’t been like this before, or maybe they just hadn’t _let_ themselves be like this before. Maybe they’d always been like this but there had been too much to lose. Now Zhenya had an overwhelming sense that they were each other’s, that that was the most important thing.

He wanted to feel Sid everywhere, skin to skin. “Off,” he told Sid, tugging at Sid’s shirt, and took off his own. He wanted more of the warm belonging feeling, but somewhere in that moment their kisses went blackout hot. That was good, too. There would be more time for holding each other and getting to laze in the knowledge that they were each other’s. Right now, all the months that Zhenya had been wanting Sid and not touching him were over and he wanted everything.

“Bedroom,” Zhenya said. He couldn’t stop touching Sid now that he had the option. He crowded Sid against the wall on the way upstairs and pushed Sid’s pants down.

“Good you always wear sweatpants, convenient,” Zhenya told him.

“Shut up and take me to bed,” Sid said.

Zhenya blew him a little on the stairs anyway, unable to keep himself from getting his mouth on Sid, and Sid gasped and shuddered and pushed him off, saying, “Bed, Geno, come on.”

When they were finally in bed together, Zhenya couldn’t think of what he wanted first or most. He wanted all of it and didn’t know where to begin.

Luckily Sid had no such compunctions. “I want you to suck me off then fuck me.”

Zhenya’s balls tightened. “How do you want?”

“Lie back,” Sid said, pushing him down.

Zhenya settled himself near the headboard, his head propped up on a pillow. Sid crawled up the bed and swung one leg over Zhenya’s chest, straddling him and rocking back on his heels, just barely resting his weight on Zhenya’s chest. He pressed his index finger against Zhenya’s lips and Zhenya sucked it greedily, licking around Sid’s finger even as Sid pulled it out and sat up on his knees, braced on the headboard, and lowered himself slowly over Zhenya’s face. Zhenya was surrounded by Sid’s huge thighs, his chest looming over Zhenya’s head, and the moment Sid positioned his cock over Zhenya’s mouth they both went frantic, Zhenya opening as wide as he could to take Sid’s whole length in, letting Sid fuck his face.

“Harder, harder,” Zhenya told him, and Sid complied, giving it to him. Sid didn’t last long, crying out Zhenya’s name as he came down Zhenya’s throat, groaning. Zhenya swallowed it all, sucked him dry, loving the feeling of Sid coming apart on top of him, loving _Sid_.

Sid was pliant for Zhenya’s fingers, afterwards, opening up easily. They fucked face to face, Zhenya’s dick sliding slick in and out as Sid clenched around him. Zhenya bit kisses onto Sid’s neck, told him in English and Russian how much he loved him. When he came inside Sid, he felt like they were together for the first time and it was true: sex had never been like this between them before.

Even after Zhenya slipped back out, they lay together, touching. “I’m so glad I’m yours,” Sid whispered, touching Zhenya’s face.

“Me too, Sid,” Zhenya said. 

After Sid fell asleep, he wondered. He liked to hope that maybe they could have found a way regardless, but how realistic was that, really? The truth was, from the moment he’d told Sid no, he’d known he’d made a mistake. But he hadn’t been willing to say so to Sid. Probably because at the time he’d known even as it had been a mistake that it also wasn’t a mistake. He was doing what he had to do to keep being who he was. Something would have needed to change, something huge.

And so, on some level, he had to wonder: had he done it on purpose? He’d been too scared to agree to what Sid wanted directly, but he had known that if he ever got caught with anyone the way he did that he would change who he was in an irrevocable way. And maybe, on some subconscious level, he’d been willing to risk that much for Sid.

*

“I want to tell my parents,” Zhenya said over breakfast the next day. He’d woken up with the idea in his head and had been turning it over for the whole time since he’d woken up. He needed them to know.

Sid nodded thoughtfully. “If you want to tell your parents, is it okay if I tell mine? And Taylor?”

He’d said it so casually, but Zhenya felt sure that he wasn’t the only one remembering the first time Sid had asked that, and how it had gone then. “Sure, Sid.” He ate some of his eggs; he was ravenous all of a sudden. “Who you think we should tell first?”

Sid considered. “Maybe Taylor? We could call her together. Just so you know, my family already knows about me.”

“Really?”

“Like, not about me and you. But about me. They knew about me and Jack, and I told them afterwards that it was going to be like that for me. That I was gay.”

Zhenya nodded, ultimately unsurprised. Sid didn’t like keeping things from his family.

Taylor’s schedule was complicated enough that Sid thought they might not catch her right away, but she picked up on FaceTime after a couple of rings.

“Hey, big bro,” she said. “Long time, no talk. You been busy?”

“You could say that. Listen, I’m here with Geno.” Sid angled the phone toward Zhenya, and Zhenya waved at Taylor. She waved sunnily back before Sid returned the whole to its original angle. “We wanted to talk to you about something. Have you got a minute?”

“Sure. I’m all ears.”

Sid shot a look at Zhenya, then grinned. “Right, so. Here’s the thing. Geno and I, we’re--”

“Boyfriends,” Zhenya interjected.

Sid handed Zhenya the phone outright as Taylor squealed, “Wait, what?” Her whole face was pure excitement. “Holy shit! When did this happen? How did this happen? Oh my God, Geno, welcome to the family! I cannot believe you’re dating my brother. No, that’s wrong, I totally can believe it. Tell me all about it. Wait, no, give the phone back to Sid so I can yell at him some more.”

“About what?” Sid said, trying to dodge the phone and failing.

“There is _no way_ this is new, and I am mad at you for keeping secrets! But not that mad, because I get a hot brother-in-law.”

“Why does everyone immediately jump to marriage?” Sid asked.

“Because you wanted to get married to him when you were eighteen and it was so obvious that even your ten-year-old sister picked up on it?”

Sid groaned.

“I am going to give you crap about this for the rest of your natural life,” Taylor said. “Welcome to the family, Geno. This is going to be fun.”

*

It seemed like a good sign that Zhenya’s parents were already at the computer when he called.

“Do you remember when you told me, over the summer, that you would support me, if there ever was someone?” Zhenya said. “Well. There’s someone.”

No matter what they’d said, he still wasn’t sure how his parents would take the news, now that it was actually happening. He definitely hadn’t expected what he actually got, which was pleased little smiles and his father saying, “So how is Sidney doing?” as though the identity of Zhenya’s someone was an utterly foregone conclusion.

“We’re so glad you two finally worked things out,” his mother added.

Zhenya stared and worked hard to pick his jaw off the floor. “How…?”

“Oh, my love,” his mother said. “If there were anyone you’d fall in love with in all of North America, of course it was going to be Sidney Crosby.”

Zhenya kept right on staring.

“Do you know,” his mother mused, “I never did like any of those girls you brought home.”

“You thought they weren’t good enough for me.”

“They weren’t! But I also thought…I wanted them to make you happy. I wanted you to be with someone who made you happy, and I could see how hard you were trying. With Anna in particular. But they didn’t make you happy. And now I think...oh, my love. There was never going to be a girl who could do that for you, was there?”

“I’d hoped there would be.”

“Oh, my love,” his mother said again. “I’m so happy for you and Sidney. He makes you happy the way you should be, doesn’t he?” She said it like it wasn’t even really a question.

“He does,” Zhenya said. He looked across the living room to where Sid was dozing in an armchair and smiled in Sid’s direction. “He really does.”

*

His life wasn’t _better_ this way. He couldn’t possibly think that a version of his life where his country wasn’t his anymore could be better.

But it was good. He was gay and everyone knew it, and no one was stoning him in the streets or dragging him immediately to prison. The fact that he had to be away from Russia for that to be true broke his heart. But there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

Or maybe there was: maybe the best revenge was to be happy. He’d never thought he could be happy if he didn’t return to Russia, but here he was. He was in Pittsburgh, his home of twelve years, and he had hockey and he had Sid. Who loved him. Whom he loved.

He still thought he wasn’t like Sid: he couldn’t decide to be happy anywhere. But maybe he could be happy here.

Zhenya still remembered what it had been like when he’d first arrived in Pittsburgh, when he hadn’t known anything about the city. The first time he’d ridden into downtown at night, coming around the bend on 376, he’d seen all the glittering buildings rising up over the rivers and thought that Pittsburgh was this beautiful thing from the future, something out of a science fiction movie, not a real city at all. He remembered trying to navigate at first and how he’d thought the bridges went places that they didn’t really go. The first time he’d been to Sewickley and not realized it was on the Ohio River and not either of the other two.

Most of the time he didn’t think about any of that, but there were still moments where he’d walk down his street in Sewickley, on the way to the first diner he’d loved in Pittsburgh, the one Seryozha had taken him to when he’d been so homesick he couldn’t concentrate on anything but hockey, and he’d see the street not as it was now, familiar, but as it had been when he’d first arrived, his first impression projected back onto now. Or really he’d see both at once, a weird kind of double vision: he’d thought the street looked a certain way when he’d first seen it, and now that it was no longer new, now that it was familiar, it looked different to him, but he could see both versions of the street at once, the street he knew now flickering to unveil the version from his memory.

It was like that with Sid for him, too: sometimes when he looked at Sid Zhenya could see him as he’d been at eighteen, kid-soft cheeks and all that eagerness, so in love with hockey that he’d barely been able to function outside of it, and then there’d be the Sid he knew now, with all the familiarity of a decade of knowing him, the weight of so much time, all they’d known together, all the seasons and the teammates come and gone. Sid had never made Zhenya promise to stay, but Zhenya would never forget the fierce joy on Sid’s face when Zhenya’s contract negotiations had come out in favor of the Penguins, when he’d signed his contract extension, the one that meant they’d play together forever, for as long as there was hockey to play.

When he thought about Sid’s face, how he always saw it with all the weight of familiarity and time, Zhenya couldn’t imagine going back to a life where he didn’t know how much they were to each other. How much they had always been to each other.

He thought he could probably decide to be happy in Pittsburgh. In a lot of ways, he already was.

*

“Hey, G,” Sid said casually, over steak dinner. “I want to run something by you.”

Zhenya said, “Okay,” and waited.

Sid licked his lips. “So I was thinking about coming out.”

“On purpose,” Zhenya said, for the sake of clarity.

“You know, I honestly never thought I’d want to come out publicly,” Sid said. “I wanted to play hockey and I didn’t want anything to distract me from that. To get in the way of that. But it turns out I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m thirty years old and we’ve won the Cup three times and we play hockey for the best damned team on Earth. What does it matter if I’m gay?”

“Sid, you don’t have to,” Zhenya said. 

Sid grinned and kissed him. “I really do, though. It’s not just for you, you know. It’s for me, too. And for us. The next time we win the Cup, I want to be able to kiss you on center ice.”

Zhenya’s whole body shocked electric with the idea of that, that people everywhere would see them being the best hockey players in the world and see that they loved each other. If he pulled Sid upstairs right away and fucked him through the mattress, he didn’t think anyone could blame him. 

*

Zhenya’s parents seemed older every time he got them on Skype, lately. That was the stress working on them, he thought. Or maybe they’d always looked older every time he spoke with them and he’d just been too oblivious to notice before.

And they were going to continue to age, and it was going to keep on happening half a world away from him. They’d come to Pittsburgh in the past, and stayed in the house he’d bought for them to live in, when they visited. He’d thought it would make it easier for them to visit without feeling like they were imposing. He’d vaguely thought they would want to stay for prolonged visits someday, once he and Anna had children.

None of that was relevant now. His parents wouldn’t dare come to the US now, especially after what he was about to tell them. They’d have to keep on growing old away from him, without him. He hadn’t ever thought this would be a conversation he’d have with his parents. But then again, he’d had any number of conversations with them over the past few months that would fit that description, and in spite of the consequences of what he was going to tell them he still wasn’t going to change his mind.

“Sid and I think we’re going to tell people,” Zhenya said. “Tell everyone, I mean. We’re going to stop hiding.”

His dad nodded thoughtfully. “It must make it difficult to live fully, when you’re hiding who you are and who you love.”

Zhenya took a deep breath. “But you know if we tell people that it means--whatever it means for you.”

“Oh, Zhenya,” his mom said. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

“We have some ideas about how to be fine, anyway,” his dad said.

Zhenya still worried about them, but his parents seemed so calm that he could let himself get caught up in their ease, at least a little. It was nice to feel like his parents could still take care of him in some way, even from the other side of the world.

*

They decided that it wasn’t worth being murdered because they hadn’t told their teammates before they went public.

“So Geno and I have an announcement to make,” Sid said in the locker room after practice. “We wanted for you to find out from us. We’re, well. We’re dating. Each other.”

“We’re boyfriends,” Zhenya added. It seemed to add a certain level of clarification for the non-native English speakers in the room, since suddenly the whole room exploded with noise.

“Pay up, suckers!” Tanger yelled.

“There was a pool?” Sid asked.

“No shit there was a pool,” Horny said. “On _when_ you would tell us you were together, not _if_. Let’s be very clear.”

Zhenya tried to muster the old terror he’d felt when thinking about his teammates finding out about him, or, later, finding out about him and Sid, and found that at some point the ability to feel terror about that thing had left his body, leaving behind only the memory that he had once felt it.

“What makes you so certain we’re together?” Zhenya asked.

“The fact that you just told us so,” Tanger said.

“You’re obsessed with each other,” Kessel said. “It’s really obvious.”

“Also, you guys are like our hockey dads,” Maatta said. “It’s totally our business if our hockey dads are dating each other.”

“We’re in our thirties, Maatta. We’re literally nowhere near old enough to be your dads,” Sid said, bemused.

Kessel snorted. “Think again, smart guy. This year’s recruits were born in 2000.”

Everyone was having way too much fun with this, Sid included. Zhenya included.

“How much money’s in pool?” Zhenya wanted to know.

“Two thousand, three hundred, fifty-eight dollars,” Tanger said, just having finished counting.

“Congrats, Tanger,” Sid said. “You’re buying dinner.”

They ended up at one of the usual Pens restaurants, a steakhouse that knew exactly what it was getting itself into and exactly how good the tips would be. Partway through dinner Sid hooked his foot around Zhenya’s ankle and left it there, pressing casually against Zhenya’s calf, and Zhenya thrilled at the fact that if someone caught them, he wouldn’t need to pull it away. If he wanted to, he could maybe even put his arm around Sid’s shoulders and pull him in close.

This wasn’t a totally private setting, he knew. There were waiters around who might take a photo, post it online. He and Sid hadn’t decided when to tell the whole world yet, just the team. Hooking his foot around Sid’s was good enough for now. But he hoped that someday soon it wouldn’t matter. He was really looking forward to kissing Sid on center ice after that fourth Cup win.

*

Sid, because he was Sid, scheduled a press conference to come out.

He’d cleared it with all levels of the Penguins organization first. Apparently he hadn’t met with a whole lot of surprise.

“This is going to be a absolute shit show,” Zhenya said. He hoped his tone conveyed what he actually thought about that: he was all in.

Sid got it. Sid got it the same way he got Zhenya on the ice: no thinking needed.

“I love you,” Sid said. He said it like he’d already said it a hundred times before, like it was familiar, like it was a fact.

“I love you, too,” Zhenya replied, and it came out reverent, new, not a familiar thing at all.

“And anyway,” Sid continued, “we’re used to the shit show. We’re professional hockey players. I think we’ve got this one.”

“If they ask about me, what you going to tell them?”

“I think I’m going to let them speculate for a while, just to fuck with them,” Sid said. “Sound good?”

“Sound perfect,” Zhenya said.

*

The gray air had a brittleness to it that meant it was going to snow soon. All his whole childhood long Zhenya had known that the feeling of snow coming was a good thing. It made him think of winter and hockey and his mother’s thick stews and strong bitter tea, New Year’s and sledding and everything wonderful in his life. And in the winter here, snow always meant it was a time when he was near Sid.

He still missed Russia fiercely, in a way he couldn’t imagine was ever going to stop. He couldn’t even want it to. He wasn’t ever going to be like his Russian teammates’ American-born kids, Russian blood and Russian language but American all the way through, really. In North America you’d never know they were Russian beyond their names. They could blend in seamlessly here, but in Russia they would stick out like crazy, with their good accents but weird vocabulary gaps and incongruous fashion sense. Even the way they walked would look wrong. And that was going to be Zhenya, always, in reverse: he’d never be able to disappear into North America.

It made him sad to know that he’d never again have that chameleon ability to fit into his surroundings without a trace of not-belonging. But since he was going to be in North America, he was also fiercely glad that he did stick out, that everyone who saw him would still have to know that he was Russian. Russia could say she didn’t want him but she couldn’t make him stop belonging to her, stop being what he was.

But there was another side to it, one that he hadn’t been able to see for a long time. For so long he’d been thinking only of what he’d lost, and never spared a moment to consider what he’d won. But he had Sid. They could get married. They could have kids. They could have a family. He’d never really been able to picture having a family with Anna or Oksana, no matter how hard he’d tried, but with Sid the image was instantly clear, like something out of an oracle: they’d have a daughter and a son, and Zhenya would speak Russian with them and Sid would have to learn Russian for real so he could understand what Zhenya was saying to their kids. _Their kids_. And the kids would make fun of Sid’s bad Russian accent, and Sid would laugh at Zhenya’s English grammar, still a mess after twenty, thirty years in America, because they’d all still be in Pittsburgh after all that time, because they’d want to stay, because that was where their family lived. Their family.

He felt the rightness of the whole thing, immediately. And he was filled with joy at the idea that he’d get to see this through. This was what he’d won.

*

“We read about Sidney coming out,” Zhenya’s father said on Skype.

Zhenya nodded. “We haven’t told anyone outside of the team about us yet, but we’re going to soon. We’ve scheduled an interview.”

“That’s going to change things for you,” his father said.

“Somewhat,” Zhenya agreed. “Most of the big changes are already done. This is more confirming what people already think than anything else.”

“Do you think--” his mother began, and his father finished for her:

“We could come to you, Zhenya.”

“What do you mean?” Zhenya said, in shock.

Zhenya’s eyes were wet before his father even finished talking details. They sketched it out for him, things Zhenya knew but hadn’t ever thought of like this: Zhenya’s brother had his own life and didn’t come to see his parents very often anyway, and Zhenya was their baby, and if he couldn’t be in Russia then they could come to him.

“You’d uproot yourselves? For me?” Zhenya said.

His mother tsked. “We’re old, Zhenya. We’ve had plenty of time to live good long lives in a place that’s familiar to us. We can spend some time feeling uncomfortable in a new place if it means getting to be where you are.”

All of a sudden Zhenya got it. He could see the world as Sid saw it: as long as he was together with his family, that could matter more than geography.

“I never could have imagined you saying that,” Zhenya said.

His father laughed warmly. “I never could have imagined my son in a relationship with Sidney Crosby, and yet here we are.”

“We’ll need some help getting to America,” his mother said. “I understand you might be able to help us with that?”

Zhenya grinned so broadly it made his cheeks hurt. “I might know a guy.”

*

**EXCLUSIVE: EVGENI MALKIN & SIDNEY CROSBY TALK HOCKEY & LOVE**

When Evgeni “Geno” Malkin came out last June, it wasn’t the grand pronouncement of gay love that the LGBTQ+ community might have been hoping for from a superstar athlete. The grainey cell phone video showing Malkin kissing someone in a dark corner of a Pittsburgh bar wouldn’t have even been newsworthy at all if the person Malkin was kissing was not so obviously another man.

But the newsworthiness of the incident began and ended there. There was no hockey boyfriend, no big love story. Malkin was gay and that was seemingly all there was to it.

We say ‘seemingly’ because was are all thrilled to have been proven wrong. There is a big story, and it’s got everything we could have possibly wished for.

We had no idea of the scope of the story we’d be breaking when Malkin finally agreed to our request to profile him. Evgeni Malkin, you see, is in a relationship with the love of his life. And it just so happens that you might be familiar with the person who is the love of his life, because the love of Evgeni Malkin’s life is Sidney Crosby.

“I never thought anything like this would happen to me,” Malkin told us.

We wanted to know what part of the whole unbelievable tale he was referring to: being gay? Being in a public relationship? Being in a public relationship with The Next One?

Malkin laughed when we posed the question. “Being gay, I know all about that. It’s the rest that’s a surprise.”

A surprise for more than just him: Malkin and Crosby revealed that throughout their 2016-2017 season they were dating each other as well.

“So for everyone who thinks being gay means you’re not whatever, not good enough, know that the two stars of the Stanley Cup winning team were dating each other.”

We made sure to follow up on that verb tense choice: _were_ dating each other?

The question makes Malkin blush. “We broke up for a while,” he reveals.

The timing of the video you’re surely all familiar with makes sense now: Malkin and Crosby had just broken up. And they stayed broken up through much of the 2017-2018 season.

When did they get back together?

“That’s a big secret,” Malkin tries to claim, while Crosby laughs.

“In January,” Crosby says.

“Sid! It’s supposed to be secret!”

“Some secret, when half the league already knows,” Crosby retorts.

Malkin considers. “That’s true. When Flyers find out we’re getting married, Giroux sent flowers.”

Whether or not Malkin is joking about the flowers, the fact that we’re having this conversation at all shows that attitudes have been changing in the NHL. Enough so that Crobsy and Malkin are comfortable talking, on the record, about their impending marriage.

“We really are getting married,” Crosby says. “Any rumors spread by Marc-André Fleury are completed unfounded, particularly anything that makes it sound like this is a publicity stunt to try to convince people to care about hockey over the summer.”

Malkin and Crosby are mum about the exact date and location of their upcoming nuptials, but suffice it to say that it will be sometime in July on the greater North American continent. The location presumably has more than a little to do with Russia’s 2013 gay propaganda law and the consequences thereof, which have led to Malkin staying in North America indefinitely rather than returning to his motherland.

“Russia’s loss,” Malkin says, seemingly casual, though anyone who’s familiar with his story knows that he’s surely anything but casual when it comes to his motherland. After he was publicly outed in June 2017, Malkin was charged the maximum fine of 100,000 rubles (about 1,700 dollars), an amount that was more symbolic than truly damaging to Malkin’s finances. A far more significant threat came in the form of his ban from international competition for Russia and knowledgeable sources claim that it would be unwise for Malkin to set foot in Russia with the current political climate.

When asked about the future, though, Crosby and Malkin both have nothing but big smiles.

“In 2013 I tell everyone Sid and I play together until we retire,” Malkin says. “I guess nobody figures how together we’re going to be.”

And with wedding bells ringing, and Malkin’s parents recently having arrived in the US for an indefinite vacation, the next question on everyone’s mind is, naturally: can we expect any little Crosby-Malkins anytime soon?

“We can’t give any details at the moment,” Crosby says cryptically as Malkin talks over him to say:

“But you know when our kids get here, everybody know they’re going to be Penguins.”


End file.
